X and Zero, SE: The Darker Worlds
by kaelenmitharos
Summary: X and Zero, sliders extraordinaire, fight for survival in worlds full of of terror and death. This story picks up after Chapter 7 of Sliders and contains the material too violent for a T rating. Consider it a set of optional chapters for Sliders.
1. Chapter 8

****_Author's note: If you've come here without first reading through chapter 7 of X and Zero: Sliders Extraordinaire, go back and read it first. I promise you this will make no sense without doing so._

_Thanks again to my wife for providing support and inspiration, to MungoJerry for beta reading, and to you for your thoughtful comments and reviews. Enjoy!_

* * *

**Chapter 8: In which our heroes find themselves  
among the ambient deceased.**

Everything vanished. One minute I had Dr. Gate in my sights, I was dashing in and had my saber cocked to cut him in half, and the next minute saw me sprawled out in a hospital bed.

I jumped from the mattress and rolled to my feet in one hasty motion. A quick glance around the room confirmed my first impression: we had officially left Kansas. An unused IV stood by the bed, monitoring equipment sat cold and dead on a nearby table, and the entire place gave off the unfriendly feel of a room that belonged to a corporation rather than a person.

I checked myself for weapons and other gear. A compact, heavy firearm hung from an ammo-loaded strap around my chest; the hilt of a katana protruded from a sheath bound at my hip, next to two fragmentation grenades. A short-wave radio sat clipped to the vest of my body armor while a backpack hung from my shoulders. Just like before, we came in to the new place as well-equipped as we left the old.

I decided to put off investigating the backpack until later. The muffled sound of footsteps reached my ears from outside the room. I had been materialized as a human again (that was twice in a row now, dang it), but my senses retained enough clarity to make out a voice as well.

"Zero? Zero, are you here too?"

My heartbeat quickened and my body tensed further as I heard X's voice. I knew that Gate had gotten me, but X too? Anger welled up from inside as I thought of that egghead, laughing it up in his lab while he chucked the Red Ripper and the Blue Bomber out into some other dimension. When we got back there I'd kill him myself and put his body on a rocket on a crash course with the Sun. Now we just had to last long enough to slide back to our own universe to make that happen.

First things first. "I'm right here, X!"

"Okay!"

I went to my door and turned the latch. Other than X's voice, I didn't notice much besides a weird reek in the air. The door opened without any trouble and I—

What the heck? Oh, nasty! "X, it smells like frickin' rotting meat out here! What gives?"

The Blue Bomber, decked out in grey-green camo gear a lot like mine, stepped out of a door across the hallway from mine and nearly gagged. "Oh my goodness, it's worse than a chemical plant out here. I don't know how humans live like this."

I glanced either way down the hall. "Maybe they don't. This place feels deserted."

"A hospital? Deserted? That doesn't make any sense." X frowned and glanced around as well. His eyes lingered on the papers strewn across the floor. "People always get sick. Hospitals don't get deserted unless all the humans are…"

He left the thought unfinished. I clenched my teeth. "That Gate, sending us here. I'm going to wring his neck when we get back."

"If." X's expression drooped. "If we get back. Zero, I don't think there's anything to stop him from banishing us for good. We might be here for the rest of our lives."

"Ridiculous. We zapped back home after only a couple of hours both times before. What makes you think it'll be different here?"

The Blue Bomber tapped the butt of his weapon, his teenage-looking face somber. "Intended purposes. Gate's first Multi-Dimensional Interfaces had the purpose of sending us on there-and-back-again trade missions. We heard his autoforge going just before we arrived, right?"

I nodded. "Yeah. So?"

"So, I think he was building that weapon of his, or a copy of it, before we arrived. It looked like one of the MDI's we used to go sliding with before but functioned more like a weaponization of the same technology. If he built an MDI for the purpose of getting rid of us, why not program it to banish us to another dimension forever?"

I frowned. "You trying to stretch out your legs? 'Cause that sounds like a lot of big leaps you made right there. Don't get ahead of yourself."

X sighed but otherwise didn't reply. I rolled my eyes.

"Sure, go in your shell and sulk instead of arguing like a man. Sheesh, X, I don't know why I bother talking to you sometimes."

X0X0X

Zero took his gun in hand and sauntered off. I sighed again and followed him down the hallway.

Truth be told, I wanted my friend to be right. After all, we had rushed Dr. Gate into the fight with only seconds to think. Suppose he did build a new MDI as a weapon, and intended to use it to banish people permanently from our universe; he had probably never tested it, and his technology had behaved unexpectedly a number of times in the past. We had no reason to assume that the weapon he used against us would put us in this universe forever.

At least, no really good reason.

Probably not.

I sighed for the third time, and rested my face in my hand. A total of one hour, ten minutes of mutually conscious marriage and Alia and I ended up separated again. Even the worst couples of the 21st century had lasted longer than that. Losing Alia after such a brief, sweet time with her—it hurt worse than anything.

Part of me wished I had never told her about the upgrade at all. My own pain aside, watching her new husband disappear must have put Alia in a state of total shock. A reploid's feelings can come unbalanced during glitches and system failures; only humans and androids, however, enjoy the privilege of overloading on emotion during normal operation. I had felt the sensation only too often during my first twenty years in the ethics testing capsule. Zero felt it on a regular basis, and inflicted the effects on everyone around him. How would Alia cope in the wake of what she saw?

How much time had already passed for her? How long had she gone without a husband? I didn't even know. A human woman's voice from long ago rang in my memory:

_"Do you know what it is to be a lover? Half of a whole?"_

I had inflicted that condition on Alia before deserting her. I charged headlong into battle with a man who had the power to make people disappear; I jumped in without waiting for backup, without devising a better strategy, without preparing myself for what lay ahead. I did it all without thinking of the possibility that I might not survive the fight. Now she had to deal not only with the pain of losing me to an unknown fate, but with the enemies that I was no longer there to face. And she would blame herself for everything.

At first I had thought to wonder: My love, will I ever see you again?

When in reality, I had to ask myself: Alia, can you ever forgive what I have done?

0X0X0

Trying to ignore the sighing sigh-person behind me, I strode quietly down the empty hallway. Rooms to either side held nothing but messy floors and abandoned paraphernalia.

Heh. That word's got "alia" on the end of it. She was probably the first one on the scene to take Gate down after we got thrown out. I'd peg her as the kind to kill first, ask questions later after seeing that he'd blasted her husband into the next dimension. Maybe she'd even be smart enough to find out where we'd gone and get us back.

In the meantime, this place looked like a wreck, and smelled like a defunct butcher's shop. Parts of the ceiling and walls hung half-torn from their housing. Wires and pieces of broken glass lay strewn across the floor. From the stink, I expected to see a cow or a bunch of puppies lying dead on the floor any minute now.

We reached a set of double doors in the hallway and that smell got even stronger on the other side. I felt like retching. This deserted hospital creeped me out worse than my old fan club on a Saturday night.

Seriously. Fangirls. Do they not understand the words, "No, I won't sleep with you, I'm a robot?" And don't get me started on the boys.

Anyway, the intersection opened up to a long hallway with more rooms and a short hallway with another pair of double doors. The lighting wasn't very good, but those doors looked strange. If hospitals in this universe worked at all like hospitals in ours, they opened up either to a way out of the building or to the operating room. I decided to move closer to check it out; X's footsteps followed behind me with occasional pauses to check the rooms we passed. He held out more hope than me for finding humans here.

In a few seconds we got close enough to the doors to make out more detail. The hairs on the back of my neck started to rise, and I walked closer to make sure I saw what I thought I saw. Eventually, about twenty feet from the big double doors, X and I stopped and stared.

I've been to a few hospitals. Not a lot, and not for my own repairs, since I have people for that at Maverick Hunters HQ—but I've been to a few hospitals. I've never seen the doors to the operating room locked and barred shut from the outside, covered with words written in dried blood. And if I had seen all that before, I wouldn't expect the words to be "DON'T DEAD OPEN INSIDE."

X0X0X

"'Don't dead, open inside?' What's that supposed to mean?" He read the top word on each door first, then the bottom two words. Zero sounded almost offended at the gory message.

"I think it's 'don't open, dead inside.' Read from top-down on the left door, then look on the right." I glanced up at the word "CAFETERIA" printed neatly in a sign above the entryway, then back to the message scrawled in wide, crusty letters across the doors.

Lights flickered on and off above us, casting inconsistent shadows across our view. A faint scuffling reached my ears through the doors. Every instinct in my body told me to run from this place and never look back. I came up beside Zero and glanced up at him; when he met my gaze, the look in his eyes mirrored mine.

As one, we turned and walked away from the double doors as briskly as possible. I spoke first. "We'll check for survivors and keep an eye out for anything dead and anything with dead meat things around it."

"The smell should give it away easily enough."

"Although, I'm a little afraid of not knowing what threat 'dead' represents here."

"I'm more afraid we'll find out."

"Hopefully we'll find someone who can help us get out of here safely."

"Either that or die trying."

"Maybe they trapped a thing inside the cafeteria and gave it dead animals to eat?"

"That's probably too much to hope for."

We moved quickly through the abandoned hospital, busting in the doors of each room in turn. After a surprisingly short amount of time, our efforts bore fruit; towards the end of the first long hallway, I busted in a door to find a not-rotting man lying in the bed. I stopped and raised my gun. "Zero, here."

"Yeah? Hey." My fellow former android looked over my shoulder at the man. "Good. He's breathing. And look, he's twitching, too. We found a live one."

I looked around at the room's general state of clutter. This part of the hospital looked less like a disaster zone than the area near the sealed-off cafeteria, but I still got the definite impression of disuse. Stepping in and running one finger over a nightstand, I found a thin layer of dust that signaled perhaps a few days' neglect. Zero moved past me to check on the man with his eight-inch boot knife in hand. We had no reason to take chances, I suppose.

0X0X0

While X checked up on the housekeeping for whatever reason, I drew a knife from my boot and walked up to poke the sleeping man's face with my finger. His skin kept the impression of the poke until I reached out and poked him again, and the color of it struck me as odd. The man's chest definitely rose and fell with breaths, but they came less and less deeply as I watched.

"X, this man's dehydrated. Find some water and bring it here in a clean thing. He's going to wake up or have spasms or something in a minute here."

"Okay." He had already gone into the bathroom; I heard water running. "Got it."

While he brought in the water, I inspected the rest of the man's situation. An IV drip ran into his wrist, a big white bandage covered part of his belly, and a hospital nightgown incompletely covered the rest of him. Untrimmed brown beard hair adorned the lower half of his face. Wires attached to his forehead and chest led back to a lifeless black box sitting on the counter beside the bed; a monitoring device, now unpowered.

Hanging from its stand on the other side of the bed, the bag for the IV had long since run dry. I turned to stand side-on to the man and shook him with my left hand. Hidden on my other side, my right hand gripped the knife from my boot, staying carefully out of the man's line of sight. No need to alarm him unnecessarily.

The man in the bed spasmed upright like an epileptic freak on steroids. I stood back and watched his eyes dart from me to X and back to me, then settle on the vase in X's hand. Water sloshed gently over the lip of the container.

X0X0X

Our new friend drank the water greedily. After he finished the water in the rinsed-out vase, I refilled it and brought it back again, and again, until the man stopped drinking from it. I put the vessel down and stood to one side, waiting for him to regain his wits.

It took a few seconds for the man to settle down enough for a conversation. In the meantime, I reflected back on the message written on those cafeteria doors. What did their writer mean by "dead?" And what intelligence or savagery had driven the people from this area? Was it a local problem, or more widespread?

I had more questions than answers. At any rate, the man's breathing had slowed down to normal. He turned his startlingly blue eyes on me and spoke his name from lips cracked by their long dehydration.

"Rick. I'm Rick Grimes. Who are you?"

"Call me Light, Xavier Light." I extended my hand towards him. He took it automatically and shook, scrunching up his forehead as he processed what I had said. In the end he decided not to comment on the name.

"Who are you? What's going on? I was—" he put his hand to his forehead as if to help bring back the memory—"I was in a shooting, this guy popped up out of nowhere…"

"You're a fighter, then?" Zero brought his knife into the open and twirled it idly. "That makes three of us. Remember anything else? Like how everyone disappeared and left behind a reek like the dead?"

His expression turned more confused than ever. "What? No, what happened?"

Zero and I traded glances. He spoke first. "So you don't remember anything?"

Rick started to shake. "No, nothing. Tell me what happened! Where's my family, are they all right? Who are you?"

I pursed my lips. Did he think his family had sent us? "I was hoping you could tell us. I'm sorry, Rick, but there's a lot we don't know about what's going on here. We're travelers passing throu—"

Zero suddenly jerked his fist to the square to signal for silence. Rick didn't get the gesture at first, so I put a finger to my lips and looked meaningfully out the door.

We smelled it before we heard it: the reek of rotting flesh, coupled with a faint, meaty shuffling. Zero drew his sword with the faintest ring of metal on scabbard; Rick's eyes followed the blade with surprise that bordered on disbelief. Readying his P-90 automatic firearm in the other hand, my friend peeked around the busted doorframe and watched the hallway for a few seconds. When he ducked back in, the man's face bore the most disgusted expression since finding Fourchan back home.

"X, that is the sickest monster I've seen in a long time. Look at it."

0X0X0

X traded spots with me and looked. When he came back inside the room he regarded me with a face that bordered on tears. I gave him an expression of disbelief until he explained.

"I think she was human once."

"No way." I peeped out again. "Human bodies don't keep moving after that kind of damage. It has to be a monster, a modified organic machine or something. That thing can't be a human."

Rick looked at us both with growing horror. "What is going on?"

I sighed. "X, take those wires and crap off him. I'm going to kill that thing. All right?"

He nodded. "Right."

I turned to the door, popped my head around the corner, and let off one shot with the assault rifle. The half-formed eyesore slumped lifelessly to the floor about a dozen yards from where I stood. While X finished extricating the survivor from his hospital bed, I watched for any further signs of movement from the monster's disgusting corpse.

X0X0X

The gunshot rang loud in my ears, much louder than weapons fire back home. Rick looked less surprised than I felt, but then, he'd probably used weapons from this world many times before now. I hid my own astonishment at the noise by focusing on the man in front of me.

"Rick. Please don't worry. We have everything under control for now. You will see that creature in a minute." I steadied the man's shoulder with one hand and carefully pulled the IV needle out of his arm. "As soon as you're ready, we're going to search the rest of the hospital for any other survivors. How does that wound feel?"

Rick stared at me in confusion for a moment until I pointed down at his stomach. He gaped at the bandage as if seeing it for the first time. In all likelihood, he really never had seen it before. I've seen people go into comas for less reason than a gunshot wound, and based on his state when we found him, a coma fit the picture strikingly well. Either way, the man quickly made his decision about the wound.

"It feels fine. I can walk. What's going on here? And why the **** is that man carrying a sword?"

Rick's bright blue eyes searched my expression for answers. Unfortunately, I had none to give, not about the important questions. I looked down. "I'm sorry. I don't know anything about that yet. Zero and I only arrived here today, and we've been out of contact with anyone else for a long time. I wish I had more to tell you."

"Are you two Nancy's done in there? We need to move." Zero peeked inside to see me still getting Rick out of bed. "This guy can move, right?"

"Yes. Yeah, I can move." The man jumped to his feet as if to prove the point and nearly stumbled to the ground. My arm caught him and kept him upright. Despite this apparent setback, a determined look formed on Rick's gaunt face. "I need to find my family."

X

We moved out into the hallway and past the rotting female corpse Zero had shot. I say female, but only the stringy once-blond hair falling from her scalp gave me the impression of a gender.

The three of us stepped carefully around the poor woman's remains. I had no idea what had kept her body moving; I wanted to believe her mind had long since gone. Unless she had been anemic before, at least 70% of the woman's flesh and muscle mass had been removed from her body, including parts of the face and nearly all of the legs.

In short, the creature had dragged herself along the floor towards our location with no respiratory system and using arms with barely enough muscle mass to function. What if a bullet to the head hadn't stopped her either? And what if another creature like that had a fully intact body to work with? The thought made me want to check over my shoulder any time I smelled that terrible odor of rotting meat.

Inexplicably, and disturbingly, it also struck me as a little familiar. Déjà vu.

As for the method of the creature's disfigurement, decay and blackened clothing obscured the evidence, but what I saw of the wounds reminded me of the remains of a deer after an attack by wolves. Besides tooth marks everywhere, the internal organs had been removed from her torso, exactly as large predators do first to prey in the wild. Everything I saw pointed to a carnivorous frenzy—except that most large predators only begin to feed after the prey has died.

At least we had brought an end to the creature's sad existence. I hoped we had, at least. Zero's bullet had entered cleanly through the forehead before coming out again through the back of the skull. Evidently, shock to the brain accomplished what other trauma had not. In that one way, the creature maintained a disturbing similarity to Mavericks back home: only destroying the brain permanently ended the threat.

That was the first time I considered the analogy while in that universe. It was not to be the last.

We didn't find any other survivors in the hospital, awake or otherwise. We did find a dead body in a hospital bed like Rick's, and another corpse lying in a hallway, but neither showed any signs of walking or crawling around. The middle-aged man in the hallway displayed a gunshot wound through the temple and no other marks besides a bloody scratch on the arm; the corpse of the little girl in the bed looked untouched. I wanted to conduct further examination to find time of death, or see whether the bodies had moved afterwards, but without all the information on the threat the dead posed here we dared not investigate too closely.

Rick stared at each corpse as if he had never seen one before. Apparently his town had never witnessed violence like this; I wished for his sake that it had remained that way.

In our world, unfortunately, peace remains a dream deferred for now.

SXSXS

"Chrome Tiger, don't let those hostiles escape. Shoot on sight but keep Gate's head and the metal box intact. You're in charge of the operation. Understand?"

"Yessir, General Signas. We'll bring them down hard." The comlink broke off.

I stood in the 0th Shinobi Unit's operator room. Layer, the head spotter, typed furiously at her console to keep track of the enemy hostiles on base. The look on her face gave away her unease.

"They move too fast, sir. I'm teleporting our fighters into strategic points on base to stop their escape, but…"

Klaxons blared in the background, along with a repeated message in my voice. "Invaders on base. Repeat, we have invaders on base. All non-combat personnel remain in your rooms and lock your doors. Invaders on base—"

I frowned. "You already sent pictures of the hostiles to the other operators?"

"Yes, sir," one of Layer's subordinates piped up. "Every combat reploid on base knows what to look for and what weapons we've seen them use. And it looks like the 17th Unit's spotters have sent medical personnel to take care of their fighters."

"Good." I wished for a strong, hot cup of boric acid to drink. My nerves needed the calming.

Another transmission came in from Lt. Alia. I listened to her over the comlink. "Yes, Lieutenant?"

"General. Have you caught them yet? Tell me you caught them!"

The ferocity in her tone hadn't gone away. I had hoped a few seconds of cooldown time would help, but no. That robot had a worse temper now than ever before. "We're working on it. Any guesses on how they got in?"

"I have a hunch," the spotter admitted darkly. "Layer says we didn't get any teleport signatures?"

"No. Our people can't find any record of them on our surveillance cameras or personnel logs, either." I glanced over at Layer. Her screen showed the 0th and parts of the 4th and 10th units engaging the hostiles that had appeared in Gate's laboratory. They had almost reached one entrance when Chrome Tiger's unit blocked the way with a river of weapons fire. I nodded in approval of the move. Zero had trained them well.

Alia paused on the other end of the line. "Of course not. Oh, no…"

"What is it?"

"Of course they can't find records of them." New bitterness filled Alia's tone. "We were so stupid. We let that reploid come in here, build his equipment with Maverick Hunter research funds, and use our own people in his work without even attempting to understand all the implications. I can't believe we let this happen."

We had tried to understand his work. No one could. But another part of what she said bothered me more. "Let what happen?"

"What just happened! General, he had to have used his technology to bring in allies from somewhere. I don't know how, or where he got them, but—gah! General, why didn't it set off warning flags when we found out no self-respecting human scientist would touch Gate's theories? Why didn't we pay more attention to his personality profile? All this time, he was a bomb waiting to explode!"

I pursed my lips. The invaders had already moved to another part of the compound. The way their signals blipped around, it looked like short-range teleportation, but Layer had all teleportation in the area locked down. Troubling. "Hindsight is always 20/20, Alia. I know you're upset that X and Zero are gone, but I need you calm and rational. You saw all of Gate's work. If you can reproduce his results, we can still get our people back. Commanders X and Zero and maybe even Private Sporkachev and Corporal Blue Rider."

ASASA

I stood in the deserted office above Gate's, the reploid's translucent green coolant dripping slowly off my armor. The anger in me transformed to sullen hatred mixed with guilt, which settled like a poison in my gut. I trembled with the aftershock of what had happened.

I had forgotten about Blue Rider and Sporkachev. In light of what I had just seen, though, their disappearance must have marked Gate's first known hostile use of the wormhole technology. He had used them to test the method before trying it against X and Zero.

That part made sense, then. But where had he brought those two other reploids from? Had the antisocial Dr. Gate, graced with all the charisma of a dead snail, made allies loyal enough to retrieve him and attempt a revival? Or did they have another agenda in mind?

I shook my head. If Gate had in fact brought them in with his subspace-manipulating wormhole technology, we had no way of guessing their intentions with any surety. Worse, if my hunch proved correct, we had no chance of beating them on an even playing field. As the scientist-reploid overseeing Gate's work, I dealt with him and his project more than almost anyone else on base; while I hadn't made head or tails of his comments as a reploid, my new android brain started to put together the pieces. I didn't like the picture beginning to form.

The general reopened our comlink channel to address me again, and the awkward pause before he spoke told me everything I needed to know. Those two unknown reploids had proven their logistical superiority from the very beginning; now, twelve dead recruits and a hundred thousand plus dollars in damage later, they had escaped MHHQ with Gate's body. Attempts to trace their movements after leaving the area had so far failed. I devoted a fraction of my processing to absorb any more important details while the rest refocused on the problem at hand.

X and Zero's teleport-less disappearance—Gate's wormhole technology—these two new reploids and everything strange about them—Gate, his escape from the brig, and everything strange about him—they all fitted together. I simply had to take the tools Dr. Light had given me and find out how. Finding out that connection would lead, must lead to finding my husband and our friend.

As I turned to leave through the gaping hole in the floor, I tried without success to drive away the nagging question:

What if I no longer had a husband to find?

XAXAX

Gutteral moans and inarticulate screams surrounded us, scores of jumbled voices merging into a single primal growl. Rotting fingers reached for us like claws, carried forward by shambling feet and bodies clothed in decomposing rags. Sightless eyeballs fixed on us like a hundred white-shuttered windows to the next world. The pharmacy department countertop barely separated us from a host of corpses, some lying in grisly piles while the rest came at us like a legion of the damned. It seemed we now knew what threat the dead of this world posed.

Tears falling from my eyes, I aimed at another of the walking dead and fired.

With a bang, a newly dead woman fell, her beautiful brown skin almost untouched by decomposition. I thought she looked old enough to have been a mother. Did her children miss her? Or had she killed them herself? My bullet entered cleanly through her forehead and ended the hollow mockery of life that had possessed her.

Zero's voice interrupted my private world of misery. He had to shout for myself and Rick to hear over the constant ringing in our ears. "They just keep coming. Well, sorry I got us all caught up in this."

He moved his P-90 swiftly and precisely, pulling the trigger twice a second at times and sending another zombie to the floor with every shot. I probably had similar aiming capabilities but couldn't bring myself to shoot without at least registering the faces of the victims.

I took aim at another, a boy in his teens, one arm missing and clothes torn and bloody. He wore a necklace with a cross on it and a pink band around his remaining wrist that said something about cancer. His face bore no semblance of human expression. I fired a round that dropped him lifeless to the ground. "You were trying to keep us safe, Zero. Besides, you helped hotwire the ambulance in the first place, and we wouldn't have gotten anywhere without that."

"Yeah. Stupid of me to start shooting, though. I should've guessed the stupid walking slabs of meat could hear gunshots and smell fear."

"Guys, I think we have another group coming in from outside. We've gotta make a move." Rick shouted over the noise of his .22 pistol. Fed, clothed and shaved, he added to the group not only his local knowledge and steady aim, but the square chin and charisma of a natural leader. "We'll run out of ammo sooner or later and get swarmed real quick. We have to get to the sheriff's department."

I nodded; as it turned out, when we saved Rick, we rescued no less than a deputy in the King County Sheriff's department. After we commandeered a vehicle from the hospital, he had directed us to his house; while Rick's family had gone missing, his clothes and some food storage remained intact. After the man had dressed, the three of us sat down for a meal and a good, long discussion of what to do next. Finding food, getting more guns and gasoline, and finding Rick's family came up on top of the itinerary for the days to come.

Unfortunately, our supposedly well thought out plans had landed us here in the neighborhood food mart, holding off a hoard of zombies from behind the counter of the pharmacy. I pulled the trigger on another of the walking dead and watched it fall back into those in the rank behind. They pushed the corpse down and trampled over it without a second thought. Probably without a first thought either.

All in all, I didn't consider this one of my happier days.

0X0X0

I pegged another couple of zombies incoming from the cereal aisle. They fell all over the boxes I had tried to snag before this all started, which made me grind my teeth. I had hoped to get out of here with my Wheaties. "Yeah, all right, whatever. It looks like there's not much good food left here anyway. Dang it, that's half an hour gone out of my day for nothing."

I didn't shout most of this, so no one else heard it over the gunfire. At any rate I finished the clip on my P-90, popped it out, replaced it with a full one, and put the empty one with all the others in my backpack to refill later. Time for a style change. "I'll clear a path through the canned food aisle. You guys grab some tuna or something on your way through. Let's go!"

With that, I put a hand on the pharmacy's bloodstained old counter and vaulted clean over it. On the other side I drew my katana and dashed down between the soup and the cup ramen to take out the first moving corpse I saw. X and Rick ran after me. X running sounded like a million pills shaking in their bottles since he had stuffed his backpack with drugs for some reason. Maybe taking some of them would make him stop crying like a sissy. I mean really, for a guy who's taken down Sigma more times than some people have fired a gun, X gets soppy about the weirdest things.

I had tried out the katana earlier, when we met our first few walking zombies outside the hospital, and it worked like a charm. Cut right through the soggy old rotting meat and hardly made a sound. Not like my stupid P-90 or .44 magnum, which make enough noise to wake the dead, apparently. Nope, for low-profile combat, it has to be the shiny new metal Z-saber.

I met a fresh (but not fresh-smelling, sadly) stream of zombies coming down the aisle and put the new Z-saber to work, ignoring for the moment the groans and moans from zombies in the adjacent aisles. With good power strokes and the right timing I took down zombies two or three at a time. I didn't care if they actually died or not; anything not connected to the brain stopped moving, and a dismembered head poses about as much of a threat as a plastic fork left with the pointy end up. Namely, none at all if you're wearing boots. Armless guys don't amount to much either in my book.

[X's note: I'm sure Zero means to imply no offense to handicapped people of any kind. I'm genuinely sorry to anyone bothered by his comments.]

My katana whirled viciously from zombie to zombie, lopping off heads, severing arms and legs, and slashing tendons and spinal cords when I felt like a change of pace. They didn't stand a chance of defending themselves. Still the meatslabs kept coming, reaching out with their nasty decrepit fingers and making noises like a pig in heat.

Don't get me started on how I know that noise. Bad, bad day to be me.

I kept up a good pace until zombies on the adjacent aisles started pushing through the shelves to get at us. Cans tumbled all over the place, as if the place wasn't messy enough to begin with, and I had to deal with arms groping at me from the sides along with the eyesores in front. Naturally, one of them went for my ponytail like Cortes after El Dorado; I had to duck and dodge to avoid a major hair disaster. And on top of all that, everything still smelled like the inside of a dead cat. Gross.

Nothing for it, though. I grabbed up the P-90 in my left hand and gunned down the zombies in front while chopping off the reaching hands and arms with one-handed slashes from the Z-Saber. Concentrating on both at once took a lot more effort than I expected, though; human brains must not be very good at multitasking. My pace slowed from a jog to a brisk walk. X and Rick slowed down behind me, too, both of them still firing their weapons as often as not.

We moved down the aisle towards the light that came from the windows at the entrance. Towards the end, the press of zombies started to let up. Had this dumb little town run out of dead peopleto throw at us? Good timing, since we had to make a final dash to the door in another few seconds. "Hey X, Rick, you ready to get out of here? The ambulance is right outside."

"**** yes I'm ready."

"Whenever you are, Zero."

I nodded, a grin slowly creeping across my face. Sure, I had left my 0th Shinobi Unit back at Maverick Hunters HQ—but there's nothing like fighting alongside an old friend like Megaman X and a new recruit like Rick Grimes. "Right. Let's go!"

X0X0X

We ran into the flood of sunlight outside weighed down with food, medicine, and basic survival supplies from the neighborhood mart. The few zombies outside moved too slowly to keep us from getting to the ambulance, and once inside, we had no difficulty driving away to the sheriff's department. With its gas-powered generator, strong walls and fence, and still-intact supply of weaponry and vehicles, the department made an excellent place to rest and resupply for the night. Rick needed the rest most of all, having recovered from a coma earlier that day to plunge immediately into a much worse crisis.

As I applied some antibiotic ointment to a scratch acquired during the grocery run, I worried about how far that crisis had spread. Cell phones, television, internet, and radio had lost all service, painting a grim picture of the world outside King County. I held out hope, however, that whatever caused the dead to change into zombies had only hit a certain area and left most of the world unaffected. Seeing King County filled with walking corpses had provided more than enough horror all on its own.

We went to bed early with plans to leave the area early the next morning. Family pictures and clothes missing from his house had given Rick hope of finding his family outside town. Even after all the devastation we saw that day, all the indications that the apocalypse had come for his world, he remained convinced he could find his wife Lori and child Carl out there somewhere. I admired his courage and the strength of his convictions.

I, too, meant to find my family again, no matter how long or how hard the road.

No matter what.


	2. Chapter 9

_Disclaimer: I do not own the Megaman franchise, The Walking Dead, Old Spice, or Mountain Dew._

_I do, however, own 100% control of Gold Spice Mountain Do Incorporated._

**Chapter 9: In which our heroes make many new acquaintances.**

Rick's hometown drifted farther and farther away behind us as the car travelled down the road. Three spare containers of gas sloshed gently in the trunk of the car, next to a few crates of plundered food and survival supplies. Rick sat at the wheel and Zero rode shotgun, his two-foot-long blond ponytail whipping around in the wind from the open car windows and a literal shotgun placed across his knees in case of trouble.

As for myself, I hadn't slept well and woke up with a fever, so the others had made me lie down in the back and try to get some rest while they drove. I lay on my side and sipped indifferently from a pouch of raspberry-strawberry Capri Sun. After sleep failed to come awhile longer, I spoke.

"So, Atlanta?" My voice came out drained of its typical energy.

"What?"

I spoke louder and aimed my voice at the ceiling. "We're going to Atlanta?"

Zero turned around in his seat to answer me. "Yeah. It's as good a place as any to check out. Why?"

"I've never been to Atlanta. Funny, huh?"

My friend gave me a long look. Needless to say, we hadn't told Rick the full story as of yet. At about this year on our Earth, Rockman and many others had fallen victim to the robot apocalypse and I lay sleeping in my capsule; however, a cursory discussion with Officer Grimes had failed to reveal any evidence of advanced artificial intelligences, let alone newer developments like wormhole technology and travel through subspace. Rick casually mentioned places like Atlanta, Georgia, which had existed in our 20th century as well, but who knew whether his Atlanta and ours looked even remotely similar?

At any rate, while Zero's expression warned me not to make Rick curious, I shrugged. Rick had already expressed his willingness to trust us without knowing our full history. He more or less accepted the vague explanation that we came from a military background and woke up clueless in the hospital a few minutes before him. What was more, I wanted to know a little about our destination before we arrived. "What's it like there?"

Rick considered this with a thoughtful bob of the head. I shifted up into a sitting position to listen. "It's big. Must be near a thousand times as many people there as in my hometown. Crowds on every sidewalk and skyscrapers everywhere. Good restaurants, I guess, but too crowded for a country boy like me."

I sipped more Capri Sun and wiped a few beads of sweat off my forehead. My whole body ached, that nasty ache that comes when you have a bad flu virus. I'd never dealt with the exact sensation as a robot; the experience brought me more sympathy for humanity every minute. "You're talking about conditions before you got put in the hospital."

He paused. "Yeah. I guess I don't know what it's like there now."

My head bowed in silent recognition of his pain. "I'm sorry. I've seen a lot of horrible things in combat, but nothing like what we saw back in town. I'm glad your family got away."

The deputy nodded and glanced at me in the rearview mirror. "Me too. Thanks for agreeing to help me find them."

"Of course."

"All right, Xavier, visiting hours are over." Zero turned again and poked my forehead with his forefinger. "You lie down and sleep. I want you in fighting shape A.S.A.P., got it?"

I frowned and considered arguing, but slumped over in the seat instead. Debating my condition with Zero promised to take more effort than I felt up to giving. "All right, but can you give me some headache medicine? My head's hurting."

"Fine. Whatever it takes for you to shut up and sleep." The Red Ripper reached into the glove box and tossed me a bottle of pills. I took a look at it and rolled my eyes.

"These are vitamin supplements. Try something labeled ibuprofen or aspirin or tylenol, Zero."

"Right, whatever." He threw back about four more bottles of medicine and slapped the glove compartment shut again. "You're so picky, sort them out yourself."

I think Rick gave him a look at this point, because Zero's next comment came in a tone of annoyance. "What? He knows more about pills and stuff than I do. I never liked using them."

The conversation continued, but I focused on finding the right medicine bottle and downing a couple of pills with a few more sips of the Capri Sun. Whatever pathogen I had caught from running around the mortuary called King County, my body did not like it one bit. As I lay back down and waited for the ibuprofen gel-caps to take effect, I hoped I wouldn't pass this bug on to Rick and Zero.

0X0X0

After a few hours in the car, we had to refuel using some of the gas in the back. Rick chose an uneventful-looking patch of road and pulled over; a few quick sniffs presented my nose with the untainted bouquet of wild vegetation. I considered this an important check to make, especially considering we hadn't seen any signs of living humans on the drive so far. Assured of our momentary safety, however, I left the deputy alone to take care of his sadly primitive, gas-burning, non-hovering vehicle.

A quick check on X made me frown. He had fallen dead asleep across the backseat of the car, and his forehead felt hot against the back of my hand. Touching him made the guy twitch and mumble, so I loosened up his gear a little more and left him alone after that. Then I noticed the juice pouch on the floor and picked it up; the thing still had half its sugar water inside. He hadn't touched either of the water bottles lying on the floor.

"Darn it, X, you've gotta get more liquid in your system. I thought you'd be done with the pouch and halfway through a water bottle." I snorted. "So much for heroic survival instincts. If I had an IV I'd stick it in you and pump you full of fluids myself."

I stopped and blinked. Something about that last sentence struck me as incredibly suspect. A quick glance showed Rick still refilling the car and at least pretending that he hadn't heard me. After a moment's thought, I opened my car door and stepped outside.

"Hey, Rick."

He looked up. "Yeah?"

"Did you have any good friends in your police unit?"

He nodded briefly. "I got along with most of them really well."

"Any in particular that come to mind?"

The deputy paused and looked down at the gasoline before continuing. "Yes, I did. Name of Shane Walsh. I didn't see him around anywhere, so it's possible he's still alive too."

A defensive tone crept into his voice as he spoke. A memory struck me…

0

_ "I don't believe this…"_

_ I scowled. "What's not to believe? We saw them go. We tried to stop Sigma ourselves. He got the best of us, and now we have to hunt him down. We'll hunt down every one of them and bring them to justice."_

_ X looked away. "I know. I know we'll have to—retire Sigma. But all of them? Isn't it possible that a few of them are still good reploids, just kidnapped or taken hostage? I just can't believe…"_

_ His sentence trailed off. In those days, we had never seen true war; we had never seen the harsh realities of the battlefield that later years brought. For the ultimate adaptive robot, X's perspective adapted remarkably slowly to those realities. While I had lived through nearly as little fighting as him, I felt from the very beginning a protective instinct for the less well-equipped fighter. _

_ "You can't, Lieutenant." I gestured in emphasis of the point. "You can't go out there believing the best about everyone. People like Sigma will use that attitude to trap you and kill you. Understand?"_

_ He looked up at me, bright green eyes shaded with worry. "How do you know, Captain?"_

_ I regarded the man darkly. "Because if I had to destroy you, that's how I would do it too."_

The memory made me grimace. That last reply had been a little harsh, even for me. Back then, though, I had to consider the possibility of X himself going rogue; he himself brought up the idea again decades later, at the end of the fourth war—just a few short weeks before this mess started.

0

_I hit the "transmit" button to connect with X's space shuttle. In a moment the Blue Bomber's teenage-looking face popped up on screen. I smiled wearily. "This is Maverick Hunters HQ."_

"_Zero!" X's face sprouted a quick smile, but his eyes lacked their typical sparkle, and the happy expression quickly faded. My own heart, so recently sundered by Iris' betrayal, throbbed with an echo of the reploid's pain. While despair and shame sunk their claws even deeper with the recollection, I pushed past the feeling and formed the rest of my intended greeting._

"_It's good to see you're safe, X. I was really worried about you."_

_His expression clouded over more than ever. "Sorry about that."_

_I hesitated. "Don't worry. It's all over. Go home and rest; you've earned it."_

_The words tasted stilted and artificial from the moment I voiced them. I had no power to console X. I hadn't so much as the power to stop Iris from defecting. Feelings of worthlessness resurged like a frothing wave from the seas of bile within me; shame and pain submerged me so completely in their heaving depths that X's next question struck me like a sucker punch from the back._

"_But Zero, what—what if I become one of the Mavericks?"_

_I searched his eyes and found nothing but honesty behind the question. My expression hardened. How dare he even consider that possibility! How dare he consider leaving me here, alone, after all this! I set my jaw and replied as dispassionately as possible. "Don't ask such silly questions. I'm breaking contact now."_

"_Wait, Zero, I'm serious!" He paused and hit me with a powerful gaze. "Zero, if I become a Maverick, you have to take care of me."_

_I paused with my finger over the "disconnect" button, momentarily overwhelmed by the force of his entreaty. My dark feelings abated as a realization struck me; I bit back my intended retort and let my body relax. _

"_Don't be ridiculous. Now hurry on back." I terminated the connection. "Everyone knows that Megaman X can't go Maverick."_

_Under my breath, I brought the thought to its natural conclusion. "Because if X went Maverick, we would know the whole stupid world was Maverick already."_

0

I regarded Rick steadily. "I know I can't blame you for holding out hope, but be on your guard. If one of your old friends starts shambling after you then you pull that trigger before it's too late. Got it?"

To my mild surprise, the human didn't submit to this. He frowned instead. "I won't shoot anyone until I'm one hundred percent sure I can't help them. I don't know what kind of experience you've had in the military to give you that kind of attitude, son, but I don't operate that way. Are we clear?"

Rick put down the gas can as he spoke. The look in those vivid blue eyes of his almost drove me back a step. After pausing a moment in surprise, I cracked a huge grin and extended my hand for him to shake. "Crystal, deputy. You're a good man to have around. In fact, you remind me of someone I know."

Despite a twinge of sudden uncertainty in his expression, the man took my hand and shook. I grinned all the wider at the firmness of it. Back home, we recruit reploids with his fighting spirit in a heartbeat. Skill you can teach; armors and weapons you can upgrade; but if a reploid doesn't have it in him to stand up for what's right, I don't know a single trainer alive who can drill it in. Rick had that spark I look for in every Hunter up for assignment.

Anyway, our touchy-feely man-moment over, the two of us got back in the car and drove off.

Half an hour passed. Before much longer, the city of Atlanta loomed a few miles in the distance. With air rushing wildly in and out of the open car windows, smells from outside reached our noses without delay, but not until the wind shifted direction did we pick up the city's particular bouquet.

Go ahead. Guess. Guess what the wind from the city smelled like.

I'll tell you this: it wasn't roses.

I glanced all around, back at X, and up to the city before addressing my new pal in the driver's seat. "Rick. We are not seriously going to drive into that, are we? Because I know all kinds of words for talking about dead meat. Get my drift?"

He frowned. "All right, but we can't say for sure that there aren't survivors like us in the city. Besides, where else are we going to look for my family?"

"Heck if I know, but think about it." I jerked my thumb over my shoulder to indicate my unconscious friend. "We already have one man down with a fever from whatever crappy germs those corpses in your town carried. If we can already smell rotting meat this far away from the city, think about the number of dead bodies in there."

Understanding began to dawn in Rick's eyes. I nodded and drove the point home. "I wouldn't go in there without a hazmat suit unless my life depended on it, deputy. I sincerely hope your wife knows better than to bring her child to live in the middle of Rottingmeattropolis."

Rick settled back in his seat with a frustrated expression. He had already slowed down from fifty miles an hour to thirty; however, I hadn't yet convinced him to stop altogether. "Yeah, that's a good story and all, but I don't know what other options we have right now. We don't have any information about where to find my family other than that they left town."

He sighed, and I frowned as a thought occurred to me. I pointed at the device he had used in his occasional attempts to reach civilization. "You're sure that communicator works properly, right?"

"You mean the radio? Yeah, we used them all the time on the police force. You have one there on your vest, don't you?"

I glanced down, and sure enough, I had a little walkie-talkie unit there. A quick check to the backseat told me that X had a matching device. Crude, but effective, I guessed. "Huh. I haven't even turned it on. Looks like I need to choose a frequency?"

Rick finally pulled over the car. "Yeah. You know, while we're at it, why don't we try your radio to make sure it works?"

"Sure." I glanced out the window and saw a pack of zombies lurching around in the distance, but they hadn't noticed us and weren't moving all that fast anyway. "How do you work this thing now?"

"Here, like this." He fiddled around with the dials and things in a way I totally would have figured out on my own. "There, it's on the emergency channel. You broadcast with it like this."

The communicator crackled and I spoke into it. "Hello, this is Commander Zero. How's it going out there? Over."

It crackled again when I stopped broadcasting. I chuckled. "Heh. Commander Zero, that cracks me up. Anyway, turn on your communicator so we can make sure this is working."

Rick looked at his device and his forehead wrinkled with confusion. "It is on. Let me check the frequencies again."

While he did that, I turned and reached into the back to try X's radio. As soon as I touched it, though, the guy's eyes popped open and he grabbed my hand like a vise. A groan escaped his lips.

"Shut up." I slapped him with my free hand and took his radio when the other Maverick Hunter's grip slackened. "You just feel crappy because you didn't drink enough fluids. Finish your stupid juice and start on the water before you go catatonic."

He didn't respond right away, so I stayed turned around in the seat while I switched his radio on and put it on the same settings as mine. "Commander Zero coming—oh, augh!"

My radio and X's started whining in a feedback loop until I switched his off. When my ears recovered, I heard a woman's static-distorted voice on my radio.

"We can hear you, we can hear you! Do you read? Is this the military?"

X made a sicky face at me and fumbled around until he found his sugar water. I held down the broadcast button on my walkie-talkie. "Yes, I read. But you're supposed to say 'over' when you're done talking so I know I can start talking. Come on, even I know that. Over."

A man's voice crackled in over the radio next. "This is officer Shane Walsh of the King County Sheriff's department. We're in a camp a few miles off of Atlanta. Who am I talking to really?"

I rolled my eyes and handed Rick the walkie talkie, mumbling that "No one says 'over' properly anymore." Hearing plastic crackle from the backseat, I looked around to see that X had screwed off the cap of one of the water bottles and started quaffing the liquid wholesale. At least as much water made it onto his clothes and face as into his mouth. "Sheesh. First you don't want any, then you want a bath."

Regardless of my murmurings, Rick had identified himself to the man on the other end of the radio, and the two exchanged phrases of what sounded like startled joy. I clambered into the back of the car and collected X's pill bottles before he got the same idea with them as with the water. "If this is what a virus does to humans, I want out. What a mess."

By the time I got back into the front passenger seat, Rick had turned the car around and started taking driving directions from the man on the other end. Apparently the deputy's family had turned up with his old friend and a whole group of other survivors only a couple of miles away. Convenient enough. I watched over my shoulder as X passed out again in the backseat.

Just what kind of bug had the former robot gotten?

A0A0A

One month's dust.

I sat on the side of X's recharge pod in his room, autoduster still in hand. A month's worth of powdery detritus sat inside the cleaning machine's transparent belly, evidence that the time had really passed. He had been gone this long already, and I?

I had nothing to show for that month but the dust.

How much time had passed for him? Reviewing X and Zero's mission reports told me enough to know that time passed differently from universe to universe. Had they experienced a week? A century? A picosecond? Even now, did my husband lie in an unmarked grave, his gray hairs passing like the rest of him to the touch of worm and bacteria? Or had he died in a fight as an android, his reactor detonating in one last attempt to protect the helpless humans around him? Did humans even exist where he had gone?

I cast the thoughts aside and stood, stalking the room for one last surface to clean. My white-gloved fingers swiped over dresser and reading lamp, strained for the furthest corner of the filing cabinet, and wriggled inside the crevices of the karaoke machine on a restless hunt for the residue of time. And while my fingers hunted, my brain continued its equally restless hunt for answers.

Where had those two reploids, Tsukishima and the other, gone with Gate's body? And the MDI with him, had they managed to make it work? What did they mean to do now?

Both the attacking reploids had vanished without a trace. No nearby teleport signatures, no results from our contacts in the underground, and certainly no reports of sphere-shaped disappearances that matched the remains of Gate's lab. And Corporal Blue Rider and Private Sporkachev who had disappeared a week before? No one knew where to find them any more than where to find X and Zero.

In short, we had lost Gate, his equipment, all the hardcopies of his notes, and any information his abductors would have had to give us. All we had—all I had, as the head of the investigation—were the research files Gate had bothered to back up on MHHQ mainframe. His incomprehensible ramblings and half-written mathematics represented the sole basis for me to rebuild the researcher's life's work from scratch.

Fair enough, I thought at first; Dr. Light had only a week before given me the most advanced processors ever designed. Not to mention the more than fifteen years' scientific training under my belt. I had the tools to take on any honest problem.

Emphasis on "honest." It had taken an entire day of devoted work for me simply to recognize the total lack of consistency in Gate's work. Variables disappeared on one line and reappeared twelve steps later in places they should never have gone. He derived the solution set for a problem, then threw out half the solutions and applied fudge factors to the others for no Euclidean reason. What contradictory, meaningless assumptions had the reploid taken to the table when he started this work? What physical vision guided the math? What scientific muse had he consulted for the logic, the bastard son of Aristotle and Alice in Wonderland?

I stopped my circuit of the room, staring at an object on X's countertop. The waffle maker. More than anything else, it embodied to me the off-beat aspect of my husband's personality, an aspect no reploid completely shared. Either they didn't have the capacity to begin with, or 150+ years of consciousness had given my husband a truly unique perspective on life. I suspected a little of both. Who really understood the last, most magnificent creation of Dr. Light?

I could have, if he had stayed.

My fingers caressed the dull, greasy cast iron of the waffle maker's interior. Only the oil and a few stray crumbs remained of our last meal together. How little I knew him—

The man I called my husband.

Drops of clear fluid fell onto the waffle maker's surface from above. I glanced up, startled, searching the ceiling for a leak. Only then did I notice the sensation of water streaming down my face from my eyes. Tears.

I reached up to intercept the salt water's flow, wondering. Had my emotions overcome me so easily?

SASAS

I swiped my keycard, and the door lock came undone with a "click." I strode into X's office. The records I needed waited in a drawer of his desk.

Muted noises echoed from the back room. I stopped and peered through the open inner doorway to see what lay beyond.

Alia lay curled in a ball beneath X's recharge capsule, sobbing pitifully. I hesitated before stepping loudly across the threshold. "Lieutenant?"

She didn't respond. I took another step into the room and looked around.

The place was spotless. A hand-vacuum lay abandoned to one side. Alia had cleaned the entire place. Why? We had mechaniloids for that, even for sensitive areas like an officer's bedroom. Certainly we had the 'bots to spare to care for the things of a hero gone MIA. "Lieutenant, what's wrong? Do you need medical attention?"

She looked up, finally. Her blue eyes glittered wetly, like the trails of tears down her cheeks. I had a flashback.

_The human woman remained sitting across the desk from me. The photos lay out in front of her; she had put her hands over her eyes. Like she didn't want to see them. _

_ Too late. The moment she asked for my help, it was too late. It was too late when her husband starting pulling money out of their savings for the jewelry. The lingerie. The fancy dinners. The other human things. _

_ Human men bought strange things for their mistresses._

_ I looked down at my oversized hands, trying to imagine what she felt. I had felt betrayal before. But to break down and cry? To sit in a private investigator's office, weeping? I hadn't blown a circuit like that since Dr. Cain's first maintenance on me. Human women did so often when they learned what had happened. _

_ "I'm sorry." The words tasted stale. I had said them to so many. Mostly women._

_ "He's—he's gone. And—" the woman's hands drifted to her swollen belly. "What will my poor Jacob think? What do I say when he asks where his father is?"_

_ I remained silent. Yet again, I knew nothing about how she felt. I had no words for the woman. Or, almost none. "Some couples recover from this."_

_ "No. No, I won't go through that. Not again." The woman glared up at me with unbridled ferocity. "I wasted five years of my life with the first one. I'm not doing that again. I won't put Jacob through that." _

_ Gloom clouded my expression further. "This has happened before?"_

_ She nodded, hands returning to hide her eyes. "My first husband went out behind my back, again and again. I forgave him and forgave him, but he—he walked all over me. I divorced him three years ago. I wanted children with someone who loved me."_

_ Which brought her to the current husband. The one with the mistress with expensive tastes._

_ The woman stayed another ten minutes in my office, weeping on and off as she came to terms with her new situation. Eventually she paid me and left._

I regarded Alia, that same look of hurt and betrayal lingering in her eyes. I already knew she was different after the upgrade. More human than I'd ever seen. That expression made her look more like one of them than ever. "Why did he have to go, Signas? Why did he leave me here alone?"

I frowned, my back stiffening. "Lieutenant. I don't want to hear you talking like that."

She stared up at me, shocked. "Sig—General?"

I walked over to the recharge pod, kneeling by where Alia lay in her civilian clothes. My dark green eyes bored into hers. "I don't want to hear you talk about X that way. He is our greatest hope. He is our greatest hero. You won't find a better man, not reploid or human.

"He won't leave you alone."

My words had an impact. Alia's eyes watered with fresh tears, and she did something no human woman ever did. She embraced me. The android's arms locked tight around my neck. "I know, I know, but. But. He isn't back, and I miss him. Oh, Signas, I miss him so much!"

I tentatively returned the hug, my huge black-armored arms closing around her slender form. Eventually she relaxed, and I disengaged to sit beside the woman while she talked. About her hopes. About her fears. About how much she missed her husband. As usual, I didn't have much to say, but it didn't matter.

For once, it didn't matter that I couldn't know how the weeping woman felt. In the middle of all of it, she stopped. Alia told me—

"Thank you for listening. It makes me feel better to know that I can talk to you."

She felt better just knowing I was there.

When she finally left for her own quarters, I stood alone in X's room. I didn't know how Gate's technology worked. I stood and wondered for a moment. Could the android hear me if I talked to him from here, his place?

"Come back soon, Commander X."

My jaw set in a rigid line. Zero would laugh at me so hard at me right now if he were here. I pressed on anyway.

"Your wife is waiting."

There was no response. Of course. Well, secretaries or no, X and Zero missing or not, Maverick Hunter Headquarters wasn't about to run itself. I left the room and picked up the records from X's desk on my way out.

0S0S0

Rick's wife and child stood out in the front of the camp, waiting for him.

The camp didn't look like much. Trees all around, vehicles parked haphazardly, a few tents. From Rick's expression, though, you would've thought he found paradise. He practically jumped out of the car and ran to meet his wife and child halfway; they came together and embraced for a good twenty seconds, chattering, laughing and crying like babies.

Other people had come out to greet us too. Shane, the other deputy, stood off to one side and started talking to Rick once his family had relaxed the death grip a little. Maybe a dozen other people, the rest of the camp, stood back aways in readiness to greet the new arrival. I noticed more than one of them carried a gun somewhere on their person.

I took my time getting out of the car and checked on X before joining the welcoming celebration. He lay sprawled across the backseat, half-soaked in water and sweat, but his skin felt cool to the touch. The fever had broken.

I didn't stop then to get a pulse. Maybe I should have.

Anyway, I left his door slightly ajar and went to face the crowd. Rick had parked the car broadside to the camp so that the driver's side faced his family, while the passenger's side faced the empty wilderness. Once I had checked on X I circled around the front of the car, ponytail swishing slowly side to side with my steady, solid saunter. SA-Rank Maverick Hunter Commander Zero had entered the scene.

As the eyes of the crowd transferred to me, Rick noticed me too and held out a hand to present me to his friends. "Everyone, this is…Commander Zero, who used to be with the military. He and his friend saved my life twice in King County, and it was his radio that helped me find your camp."

For a moment they just stood and took in my 6'3", 188 lbs of pure physical power, the statuesque lines of my strong-chinned tan face, the half-dozen weapons and forty pounds of equipment on my person, the sapphire blue eyes and the elegant golden ponytail falling down to the middle of my back.

I let the humans get their fill of me before giving them a half-smile and a wave. Really, with the way the women stared, it felt just like the beginning of one of those Gold Spice Mountain Do Energy Drink commercials I used to do. "Nice to meet you guys."

"Welcome." Shane, a man with curly black hair and brown eyes, came to shake my hand. "Where's your other friend?"

Rick had mentioned both of us over the radio in passing. I took Shane's hand and shook it firmly in my own. He had a weak sauce grip, though. "Commander Xavier Light is in the car. He caught a nasty bug and woke up with a fever or something, but it broke a few minutes ago. That guy's way too tough to let a little bug stop him for long."

Shane gave Rick a glance that made the other deputy crinkle his brow. Finding no further information there, the brown-eyed police officer looked back to me. I noticed the man's right hand settle closer to the handgun sheathed at his side. "I assume you've met a few walkers since you woke up. Did your friend have any problems with them? Like, a bite, or a scratch maybe?"

I regarded the man carefully. Parts of me tensed up as I watched Shane's face. I also didn't fail to notice how a few of the other survivors started fidgeting or staring. "Yeah. When we got out of the grocery store he had a little scratch from when a meatsack got in a lucky hit. It's nothing serious, though. Why?"

Then it clicked.

Walking corpses that only stopped with a mortal blow to the brain.

The little girl with a scratch and a bullet hole in her temple.

Rick, abandoned in the middle of a zombie town but still breathing.

Atlanta, overrun.

No government help or assistance anywhere, not even from outside the area.

Survivors asking questions about bite marks and scratches. My eyes widened.

"This walking dead thing is a plague."

Shane nodded and looked past me to the car. From his stance and body language alone I knew what he wanted to do. "We need to take care of your friend before he turns."

Every feeling in my body intensified. Time slowed down as I made my reply.

The Z-Saber slid with a long, slow ring from its sheath as I drew the weapon out. With a lazy motion of my wrist I leveled the bone-carving blade of the katana at Shane. He stumbled back to stay away from the steely edge.

"Over my dead body."

Everyone froze, their eyes drawn like magnets to my katana's still, steely blade. Even Rick stood paralyzed from the shock of watching his savior turn against his best friend. I regarded Shane levelly. When I felt I had everyone's attention, I spoke again.

"My friend will survive this thing like he's survived everything else in his messed-up life. Because if you think this zombie disease is bad, you have no idea what life is like where we're from."

Noises from the car interrupted my monologue. With the camp this silent, we easily heard X's groan and his slow exit from the passenger's side of the car. The noise and its implications broke the spell enough for Shane to speak.

"Everyone stay back! I don't want anyone else bitten!" He put a hand to the pistol sheathed at his hip and stepped back. I drew my own weapon back behind me in preparation for a rushing attack. Shane's eyes flickered from the katana to the car and back to me, and I saw his muscles tense to unship his gun. For my part, I tensed to spring.

"Shane! Zero! You stop this right now." Rick stepped forward as his wife hurried out of the way with their child. "There's no call to be drawing weapons on each another."

In the background, the thud of boots on the ground told us X had begun to make his way around the car. Shane's expression turned ugly. "Well in that case, this Zero had better be ready to take care of things when his friend comes out here looking for blood. If he comes anywhere near my people, it's on your head."

He pointed that last statement at me along with his finger. I looked down at the finger and fiddled visibly with the Z-Saber's hilt; Shane jerked the digit back and stepped farther away. An expression of satisfaction crossed my face and I sheathed the weapon with a flick of my long blond hair. That done, I walked over to meet X as he rounded the front of the car.

When the Blue Bomber came into view, I frowned at the look of him. The fever had paled his skin and left ugly bags under his eyes; X shambled slowly towards me and leaned on the car as he went. As we neared, he stumbled, and I dropped to one knee to catch him before he hit the ground.

"Xavier. Talk to me, are you all right?"

He leaned on me for a moment, breathing heavily. At length the Blue Bomber spoke.

"I had a really bad dream."

That made me chuckle. I helped the man up to his feet and leaned him against the car. "What, the sugarplum fairies didn't show up this time? Or they showed up and wanted to rip you open for dinner?"

"More like the second one." He looked up around camp. "I feel better now, though. Hi everyone. Rick's family?"

I smirked. "They're safe. Thanks to your walkie-talkie, we found them and a bunch of other survivors. Didn't we, Shane?"

The deputy folded his arms and tried to hide his obvious embarrassment behind a wall of resentment. "He must not have had the virus after all. Why did you tell us he'd been scratched?"

"You idiot, he was scratched. That means he took your zombie bug and broke it like a bad horse." I laughed with hands on hips. "Dumb bug should've known not to mess with Commander X."

"Yep, that's me," X self-identified blearily. "Commander Xavier Light, at your service. Umm, does anyone have any food? I don't think breakfast happened until awhile ago."

X0X0X

"All right, let's unpack the supplies." Rick moved to open up the car; I didn't miss the note of relief, or—hope?—in his voice. "We cleaned out a few houses and the armory before leaving town. I think you'll all like what we found."

At this point people in camp started getting really excited. Zero and I waited patiently off to one side while Shane and Rick started divvying out weapons and other supplies. My old friend filled me in on a few details in a low tone, like the contagious nature of the walking death and how the survivors reacted when they heard I had taken a wound from a zombie. At one point, though, the blue-eyed deputy interrupted us by calling me over. He gestured to the grocery bag full of medication and bandages.

"Xavier, I want to put you in charge of medical supplies. You were the one who grabbed them from the pharmacy, so I figure you know the most about how to use 'em." Rick handed me the bag for everyone around us to see. I smiled and shrugged wearily.

"Sure, I can do that. I'll put Zero in charge of fixing up injuries, though. He knows more about that than I do."

"Yeah? Well, I'll trust your judgment." Rick nodded to me to indicate we had finished. I walked off with the bag, feeling several pairs of eyes on me. The deputy probably did think me a good candidate for the job of dispensing medication; more to the point, though, his giving me a responsibility told the others that Rick considered me competent and reliable. I smiled at his thoughtfulness as I rejoined Zero.

A young man of Asian descent stood chatting with my fellow Maverick Hunter. Zero glanced over at me and gestured for the man to pause. "Xavier, this is Glenn. He says he wants us for a sortie into the city. Here, kid, why don't you explain to him while I grab some grub."

Glenn looked me up and down before speaking. I blinked wearily, thinking about that food Zero promised. I probably looked like a mess from sleeping in the back of the car all day. What time was it, anyway?

"So, you really survived the virus?" The young man glanced down at the scratch on my hand from the day before. I followed his glance and raised the member for inspection.

Removing the bandage revealed a jagged scab on skin still slightly inflamed, indicating a continued immune response to the problem. I replaced the bandage as well as possible and let the hand drop to my side. My head still felt a little too fuzzy to process all the possibilities, but I had bad feelings about letting anyone touch that wound. "I guess, if it really is a virus. I had the weirdest nightmares before the fever went away, though. These waffle guys, Zero in this black armor—anyway, sorry. I'm not at 100% just yet."

I rubbed my forehead with the other hand. Glenn regarded me steadily in spite of how crazy I must have sounded.

"You know, no one's ever heard of surviving infection with Wildfire before now. You get hurt, you come down sick, and next thing, you're one of the dead. If you have an immunity then you're the first person."

I bobbed my head in appreciation of the idea. "I was kind of designed with good internal security, so that makes sense. Oh. Um." As Glenn's eyebrows rose, I decided to change the subject. "So, you want to go to the city? Why is that?"

"I usually make supply runs to keep us fed. I worked for years driving a pizza delivery truck, so I know my way through the city and all the shortcuts to use. I can sneak in and out fine on my own, but Shane wants us to make a big supply run for food and clothes…" Glenn looked away, unsuccessfully trying to keep from showing his frustration. I looked around at our fellow survivors, numbering about twenty with the addition of us three.

"How many people were going to go?"

He pursed his lips and gestured at the people. "Practically a third of us. I think it's going to turn out really badly, but Shane's convinced we need to do it, and he runs the camp."

I turned my head to watch Shane and Rick talking about supplies, and the messages in their body language struck me. Shane had assumed a hands-on-hips position and nodded a lot, his gaze frequently dropping to the ground. Rick looked Shane right in the eyes and spoke with his thumbs tucked in his pockets, his body bowed back ever so slightly and his shoulders square. Rick had taken the alpha position, Shane the beta, as clear as day. "I'm not so sure he's calling the shots now, Glenn, but go on. Why me and Zero?"

In answer, the young man nodded towards a couple of the other survivors. "He was planning on sending me with Andrea, Jacqui, T-Dog, Merle, and Morales." He pointed in turn to a young blonde woman, a middle-aged African-American woman, a younger black man, an overweight white man with gray hairs, and a Latino currently hugging his wife and children. "Merle is crazy and racist as all ****, so he gets along with T-Dog and Jacqui like a house on fire. Andrea means well but panics easy. The city's so full of hungry walkers that one mistake can bring them down on you like an avalanche. I don't want to go in there with a group, but if I have to, I want a group with better odds at coming back out alive."

I blinked heavily and donned a flat expression. "You're quite the flatterer."

"Listen, if you knew what it was like in there you'd agree with me. But you have experience sneaking around from the military, right?"

I thought back to my time as a Maverick Hunter and tried to avoid looking over Glenn's shoulder. "Yep, I've had to slip through a few security nets. Zero's better than I am, though."

"Darn right I am." Glenn jumped as my old friend dropped an arm around his shoulders. Zero grinned at him from inches away. "Surprise. Tuna burritos, anyone?"

X

"Whoooooo!"

Glenn hung the upper half of his body out the car window and screamed like a maniac. T-Dog burst out laughing at the sight, and the soda he'd been chugging spurted out his nose, which made Glenn laugh too. Zero rocked out in the front passenger seat to the unidentified heavy metal pounding from the speakers. I grinned with my hands on the wheel, partly at the rush of adrenaline from our escape from the city, but mostly because their happiness spread like an infection. The good kind, this time.

"Ah, man, why'd you have to make me laugh like that. Gross, it's everywhere."

"I can't help it if you think I'm funny, man! Wipe it off on your shirt or something."

"It's all over my shirt already, man. **** ****, that was one crazy last run there."

"Psh. You guys don't even know." Zero waved like shooing off a bug. "Only the one apartment building exploded and I still have all my clothes on. That was practically tame compared to the action in Africa."

Theodore, or T-Dog coughed spasmodically. "You know, from all the stories you tell about Africa, I'm surprised the place is still standing. Agh, I was having fun before, but this stuff burns my nose."

After learning a little more about our group, Zero and I had decided to be mercenaries who worked most recently in Africa. The story went that we worked there for years without much contact with the outside before our employers supposedly drugged us and dumped us in King County. Zero had a real name but preferred the nickname by which he introduced himself. We called ourselves "Commanders" sometimes as an inside joke and missed our old squads.

It wasn't a watertight story by any means, but no one in the group had any actual counterevidence, so most of them just accepted it (or at least pretended to) and moved on. When Zero told tales about the old days, I just let him tell them like he wanted and dropped subtle hints about his tendency to exaggerate. Only the people who didn't like us in the first place had bothered voicing doubts about where we came from.

"Sheesh, we made it out of there with," Glenn craned around to see the back of the SUV, "eight crates of food and a bunch of ammo! I don't think we could fit any more back here if we tried. I hope the beer's still good."

"Ah, you're tellin' me. I haven't had a good Brewski in a month and a half," T-Dog replied.

I gave Zero a look full of hope. Now that we were human, just a taste from one of the bottes? He snorted and shook his head. "Can someone give me a rag and the rubbing alcohol? I still need to clean the Z-Saber. It smells like dead city."

"Yeah, sure man. ****, I still can't believe we got out of there without using any bullets until the end."

"That's our man Zero." Glenn passed up the rubbing alcohol and a nice new dishtowel. "I didn't think we'd get out alive with the walkers all around the car like that."

Zero uncapped the alcohol and dumped a liberal amount on the rag. I smiled back at the others. "Don't worry so much. Even if we hadn't found that basement full of propane, Zero and I would have found another way. There are always other explosives."

For example, the brick of C-4 I kept hidden in my backpack, or Zero's grenades, or the unexploded ordinance we found in that military truck. Who goes into a fight without extra alternatives? Even without the Variable Tool System, I am all about alternatives.

Glenn laughed. "I swear, you guys are like double MacGyver with guns."

T-Dog scoffed. "MacGyver? What are you saying, son? Zero and X are the A-Team."

"Oh really? Which ones?" I didn't miss the tone of challenge in Glenn's voice.

"All of them. We got Xavier as Faceman and Hannibal, and Zero is Mr. T and Howlin' Mad Murdock."

"What? We haven't even seen Zero pilot a helicopter. And no offense, but I can't picture Xavier as a con man. Double MacGyver for how they set off the alarm at the bank from a block away."

My idea there. Zombies are attracted to noise, so it made sense to set a distraction. Zero held up his weapon for inspection, smiled, and sheathed it with a "schlink." He opened his mouth to speak, then stopped and shot a glance up at the trees by the road ahead. "What the—X, look!"

I looked in the direction of the man's outstretched finger. A flash of blue caught my eye, but when I tried to follow the motion, my gaze met nothing but trees.

0X0X0

An incredibly slight build, like that of a teenager of one of the smaller varieties of human. Pale skin and an Oriental cast to her face. Socks almost knee high, unassuming shoes, blue skirt and a blouse styled like a feminine version of a sailor's uniform. And the hair—her royal blue hair fell to the waist, so long and free and perfect that I knew nothing in this world could match it.

The girl stood casually on a tree branch. For the barest moment I saw her watching us with the slightest of smiles. Then, she disappeared, vanishing so tracelessly a lesser man might have wondered whether she ever existed at all.

Not me. I don't make a habit of imagining things.

She had been there.

"I don't see anything, Zero." X frowned and slowed down the car. "What was it?"

My tone thrummed with urgency. "I saw a girl there in the trees. We have to stop the car."

He glanced over at me before turning back to the road and putting on the brakes. "You got it."

At this point the humans in the back started asking questions. "What did you see?" "What did she look like?" "Where did she go?" "Are you sure?" Eyes remaining locked onto the place where I last saw the girl, I responded in clipped tones.

"A teenage girl in clean clothes with blue hair. Let me out!"

I unlocked and opened the car door before the car had stopped moving. My legs carried me at top speed, but still too slowly back to the place where I saw her; somehow I felt my chance had already disappeared. I looked all around, up the tree, and saw nothing. Green leaves fluttered slightly in the breeze.

My fists clenched involuntarily. After a long moment of considering whether to climb the obviously empty tree, I heard X's voice come low and tense over my walkie-talkie.

"Zero, we have walkers incoming from the woods. I see about a dozen right now, fifty yards off to the south-southeast. Did you find the girl? Over."

I pounded my fist against the tree. "Negative, the girl's gone. Returning to the car, over."

I turned slowly back the way I had come. The image of the girl remained emblazoned on my mind like a warning, or a taunt, a piece that so obviously didn't belong in our puzzle. Knowing that I had seen her and hadn't caught her bothered me like an itch under the skin.

Who was she? Where did she come from?

And what about her made me so desperate to find her again?

With difficulty, I shook off the inexplicable feelings and ran back towards the car.

X0X0X

Zero returned at a run, preceded by Theodore who had left the car to follow at a slower pace. The zombies had spotted us, but at their speed, they didn't stand a chance of reaching us before our friends. T-Dog, then Zero jumped in the car and closed their doors as the lead walkers neared the treeline past the far side of the road. My fellow Maverick Hunter shouted one word.

"Drive!"

I stomped on the gas hard enough for the tires to squeal; behind me, Glenn kept a shotgun trained on the approaching zombies until we left them in the dust.

Before the moment passed I glanced at Zero. Frustration pinched his face into a scowl; much, much more surprisingly, though, a glint of fear hid in his eyes. I reached over and touched his shoulder. "Zero. Are you all right? Shouldn't we go back and look for that girl?"

Zero didn't respond for a second. Instead, he looked out the window; the slight reflection off its surface showed me an expression of worry deeper than I nearly ever saw on the cocky warrior's face. What in the world had happened in that forest? "Zero?"

"What? No. She's gone. I don't know where she went, and we can't risk our people looking when we don't know where she went or how she got there in the first place." He frowned severely.

Glancing at the backseat, I saw Glenn and T-Dog share a glance. Sure, they respected Commander Zero in their own way, but claiming to see a blue-haired girl who disappeared before either of them saw her? Up in a tree? They probably put it down to stress or simple Zero-style craziness.

I knew the man behind the katana better than that, so I decided to probe a little further. "Not even if she's alone in the forest?"

"No." He paused, and muttered the next line in a tone so low that I nearly didn't hear. "Normal problems like that won't bother her."

I let the conversation go at that for now. Whatever Zero had seen, he didn't feel comfortable discussing it in present company. With that thought I cast about for a way to change the subject; a quick look in the rearview mirror provided one immediately.

The zombies had changed course to follow our SUV down the road. My brows furrowed. "You guys don't think they'll track us back towards camp, do you?"

T-Dog and Glenn both looked back over their shoulders and noticed the same thing I had. The Asian-American replied first, albeit uncertainly. "I don't think they can do that."

The African-American turned back to the front and shook his head after a moment. "If you ask me, I don't think they'll remember what they're doing long enough to get to us. They'll wander off somewhere else instead, trust me."

I glanced over at my old friend to see if he had any more comments. He stared out the window with abnormal intensity, as if hoping to spot that girl again out in the woods. The girl that no one but him had so much as seen.

We drove back in silence, each wrapped up in his own personal contemplations.

"Double MacGyver."

"A-Team."

Or not. I rolled my eyes and kept on driving.


	3. Chapter 10

_Sorry if this feels at all rushed. I'm no longer able to work on this story; chapter 11 will be the last. I'll explain more in the next update._**  
**

_Too bad, too. I was going to send them to the Legend of Zelda universe next. They will need it after what happens in chapter 11._

_Thanks to MungoJerry for her beta work as always._

* * *

**Chapter 10: In which we discover the fate of a villain.**

Camp emerged from the trees before us like a poor man's paradise. The odor of cooking food reached our noses even before we stopped the car, and in no time at all, the four of us from the resupply raid had unloaded the car and received freshly heated cans of chili con carne in return.

I wandered towards my bed of leaves near the south end of camp and sat down. Through my haze of thoughts I noticed X following me with his can o' beans in hand. When I found my seat on a handy rock, he settled down cross-legged a few feet away and regarded me intently. I shoveled chili into my mouth without speaking while the experience in the forest replayed in my mind.

A girl, standing in a tree, looking far happier and cleaner than anyone in this ruined world had a right to be. What had so stricken me about her, though? I clutched the can tighter as fragments of memory flickered to the surface in answer.

The warmth of a wet cloth, running over my bare, bloodstained chest. Running water and a soft touch accompanied with a soothing soprano voice—I couldn't recall the words.

A pair of hands, arranging odd chopped-up foods into a box with steamed white rice.

A brutal stroke of my sword accompanied by a scream that meant death.

"Where did these memories come from?"

"Memories?" X's voice impinged on my private reflections.

I looked up at him, startled, then realized I had spoken out loud. My head shook back and forth to dismiss the thoughts. "Never mind. Nothing for you to worry about, Xavier."

He regarded me for another long moment, pursing his lips, before sighing. "You've taken to calling me by that name quickly. It's easy to get lost here, isn't it?"

"Lost?" I glanced at the Blue Bomber askance. "Not really. There are roads and compasses for everywhere we need to go."

"No, not 'lost' directionally. I mean it's easy to forget about going home. Life here is pretty distracting." He scooped another forkful of chili from can to mouth and glanced up at me meaningfully.

"Home." I felt a pang of guilt, but kept my expression stoic. "Yeah, I know. We can't leave Sigma there with them. They can't fight him without us."

X nodded, looking down. "Yes. Yes, it puts the Hunters at a serious disadvantage. Anything we can do, any clues about triggering a return home, have to come out into the open as soon as possible. Have you seen or," he paused, struggling for words, "experienced anything strange recently? Like… déjà vu?"

"Déjà what now?

"Experiencing a sense of recognition for something you've never seen before. It's common with humans, and I've been having it more and more in this world." X fidgeted with his fork. "Whenever we see many of those undead in one place, and especially out here in the woods. It's like something I've seen before. Do you know what I mean?"

I stared wide-eyed into the middle distance, memories surging unbridled past my mind's eye. "That's—"

"Walkers! We have walkers incoming!"

X0X0X

The two of us jumped to our feet and took up our weapons in one trained movement. Zero ran in the direction of the shout while I took a second to look around our side of camp. With the wind blowing in from the south, though, I would have smelled any walkers from that direction before I saw them. I sprinted over to the RV and scrambled onto the top for a better view of camp.

Gunfire sounded from the northeast. I recognized the blast of a shotgun and Zero's P-90 as well as pistol fire. A quick glance in that direction showed me a group of perhaps a dozen zombies incoming; a few of the survivors, my friend among them, stood against the attack with guns blazing. From my place on the RV I scanned around our perimeter for more of the walking dead.

I saw nothing. And with Zero on the active front, the battle ended in a handful of seconds. After checking for any more immediate danger, he turned around and spotted me on the RV almost immediately. I mustered a smile and gave the man a thumbs-up. "All clear from what I can see!"

"Good for you!" He looked around at the others. "Everyone alive?"

At a moan from behind, Zero glanced back and fired once at a half-recumbent zombie. The zombie slumped back to the ground with a bang that echoed through the woods. The Maverick Hunter's face remained impassive. "I wasn't talking to you."

He again turned to regard the camp. "Like I said. Everyone alive?"

"I think we're all okay, yeah." Shane stepped forward after looking around. Those in camp with children had secured them by now; they huddled in their family groups, terrified but physically unharmed. "We've never had walkers come this far up into the mountains."

Busy inspecting the fallen enemies, Zero glanced over his shoulder and rolled his eyes. "Pft. This is why we told you to post sentries the day we got here."

Irritation flashed across the brown-eyed deputy's face. "Well I'm sorry if we didn't know we'd have walkers hunting for us. You haven't had to keep this camp running day to day for the past month, so I suggest you keep your mouth shut until someone asks for your opinion."

With one last glance around the perimeter, I jumped down from the RV and stepped quickly towards my friend. But instead of turning on Shane, he remained stooped over one of the zombie corpses. After a moment the Maverick Hunter looked over his shoulder and spoke.

"Glenn, X, take a look at this thing."

I walked on over, returning Shane's angry look with a raised eyebrow. Glenn came forward as well. Meanwhile, in my peripheral vision I noticed Rick leave his family to join the scene.

At the moment, though, I followed Zero's direction and inspected the fallen zombie with Glenn. Bullet hole through the eyesocket, rotting flesh, clothes torn and bloody; all disturbingly ordinary for this world. This particular individual seemed perhaps a little familiar. Glenn echoed my initial thought with a quiet comment.

"What about it?"

"Look again." Zero pointed out another of the zombies. "Try that one, maybe."

In the background, near my above-average threshold of hearing, I listened to the two officers and others talking in hushed tones.

"They can't just—" Shane, still angry.

"Not here. Not now. Later. Right now we have bigger problems than who gives who orders." Rick's tone brooked no argument.

At this moment I looked to another of the stricken zombies laid out nearby. He was an elderly male dressed in tan slacks and a badly stained red shirt; at some point before turning into a zombie, he had applied so much gel to his hair that it remained in a recognizable part to the hour we ended him for good. Immediately I realized what felt so familiar about this group.

"These are the same individuals we saw on the road a few minutes ago." I looked up from the corpse at Zero. "But—"

"But that group turned onto the road to follow us, and we turned south off the highway to get here to camp," the other Hunter nodded as if I had confirmed his suspicions. "Then this little road bends east so that it comes onto camp over there."

He pointed over at the west end of camp, the other side. I looked to the walkers.

"And these came from the northeast, as if they made a beeline to the camp from where we met them." My eyes met Zero's, the grim cast of his countenance confirming that he had already caught on. "Even though we saw them turn onto the road to follow the car."

Shane chose this moment to break in. "Wait. You saw them following you and didn't take care of the problem? You led them—"

"Shut up." Zero chopped a hand through the air for emphasis. "If they had just followed us or the road they would have come at us from the other side of camp. That didn't happen. These meatsacks started on their way to camp long before we saw them on our way back. After we distracted them and they started following, something or someone changed their route back to a straight shot for camp."

Rick frowned, arms folded. "I find that a hard coincidence to accept."

"They're right." Glenn stepped away from one of the corpses with a haunted expression. "I've seen these guys before. They got pretty close to the car before we took off."

The blue-eyed officer, Rick, nodded but kept his stance closed. "Granted, then. But what are you saying, Zero? Someone led them here?"

Zero shrugged and looked at me with a frown; I shook my head. "I don't think it's as complicated as that. It doesn't make sense for someone to risk himself leading around a bunch of disease-carrying monsters." I pointed to the body of the man who had taken such care to gel his hair.

"These units are soldiers."

0X0X0

Everyone stared at the Blue Bomber who had, in fact, just dropped the biggest bomb ever. Pun intended.

After a long moment, Rick ventured a question. "What are you saying?"

"Glenn." X turned to the man. "When all this started happening, how did the news networks describe the spread of the plague?"

The oriental paused and looked around nervously, like a rookie called out from the line during inspection. "They called it the Wildfire Global Outbreak. People started turning into walkers everywhere. Europe, Asia…"

X nodded. We had heard as much on our first day in the survivors' camp. "It broke out everywhere at once, even though the infected don't become contagious until after death. Even though a sick person dies within hours, and most mass transit companies won't ship the critically ill or newly dead across national boundaries. Even though a walker on its own moves at a lurch or a crawl. Despite all these limiting factors, Wildfire made it around the globe in a matter of days. Remember that."

He suddenly switched tacks, looking again to Glenn. "How do the newly undead behave?"

Glenn answered again, gears beginning to spin behind his dark brown eyes. "They look for people to eat."

"Right. Many of you have seen that for yourselves." X's voice quieted for this statement and looked around. "Why do they do it?"

"There's no reason why. It's just instinct. They just do it." Shane glared and made a gesture as if to ask, "so what?"

"You're right and wrong. It is instinct, but there's a reason." X gestured towards a nearby walker with bloodstains all around its undamaged mouth. "Zero, cut into that one's stomach."

"Will do." I drew my katana and laid the creature open with one quick swipe. A firm nudge of the boot displayed the contents of its slashed-out stomach for everyone to see. Rotting human flesh twitched with maggots and new flies. I tried not to breathe. "Delightful."

"Look at that." The Blue Bomber pointed; a couple of people moved closer to see, then quickly away again. "The body's dead. It's not producing acid or enzymes, so nothing taken in gets digested. Like Shane said, eating does no good for the walker. Attempting to feed causes nothing but terror, death, and more zombies."

X's object lesson obviously over, I quietly stepped away from the corpse. You can get sick from sticking around a dead critter like that.

"We already know that. You didn't have to tell Zero to cut that man open like that." Rick spoke quietly, disturbed. X turned to him with an agitated expression. The Hunter held his hands out as if to say, "come on!"

"If you know, then how have none of you questioned why? Four days I've been here now," the man held out four fingers as if to drive home the point, "and I have not heard one person seriously wonder what caused the disease, where it came from. No, I won't accept the idea that God sent it. That's a cop-out. And no, I don't accept that it 'just happened,' not when nothing like this has ever happened before. What natural plague kills the mind and then turns the body into an undead weapon?

"Someone made this disease." X gestured broadly at the dozen-odd zombie corpses behind him and turned to regard the other survivors; over half the camp now stood within earshot, watching. "He engineered Wildfire to kill, he programmed the victims to make it spread, and then he planted it in as many places across the globe as possible. Now he, or his lieutenants, are coming around to send the foot soldiers after any survivors. That means us."

A moment of silence took the camp. The mention of a "lieutenant" brought my thoughts back to that girl I saw in the tree before the zombies came after us. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me one bit if her presence in this part of the forest had given him the idea of enemy lieutenants in the first place.

"So we're being targeted?" Glenn's voice quivered. "But how is this person controlling the walkers? We've never seen anyone like that. It doesn't make any sense."

The Blue Bomber pursed his lips. "I don't know for sure, but if I can get to a laboratory, I know how to find out more."

"The Center for Disease Control," Rick reasoned. "You want to go there and help them make a cure."

Merle Dixon, silent until now, scoffed and drawled out what he probably took to be a clever joke. "That's funny, you don't look like a doctor."

I rolled my eyes. "X is immune, you rube. Don't you think he might be slightly helpful to the eggheads most likely to figure out how to deal with this mess?"

I cut off any response to my question with a quick twirl of the shiny metal Z-Saber. "But don't worry, we can argue about going to the CDC later. Right now we need to figure out how to deal with the people sending zombies at our base camp. Anyone have any ideas? 'Cause I'm full of 'em."

"Now you just hold on one minute," Shane interrupted. He stalked up towards the two of us with a hateful look about him. "No one's agreed to your crazy conspiracy theory, and no one's going to do anything until we make a decision as a camp. I don't like it how you two just waltz in here and think you own the place. I—"

"Shane." Rick stepped towards the other deputy with a frown. "This isn't about who's in control. It's about keeping our people safe, and these two have a lot of experience with combat. I don't know if someone is out there to get us, but no matter what way you look at it, we need to do a better job of protecting the group. Let's calm down and figure out the best way to go forward together."

X nodded. "I agree. And for now, we need to take care of these bodies. Zero and I will drive them out and drop them in the forest while the rest of you make a decision about what we've said. All right?"

Predictably, it was not all right. "Whose car are you taking?"

I rolled my eyes. At this point T-Dog walked up from the other side of camp and glanced down at the zombie bodies in surprise.

"Sorry, had to drop a few logs in the woods. What did I miss?"

X0X0X

As I drove the SUV out of camp, bodies piled on a carpet of dirt and leaves on the floor in the back, I glanced over at Zero in the passenger seat. "You know what this means about the girl you saw in the woods."

He nodded, a dark look passing over his blond-bearded face. "Yeah. She's probably the one."

"If we see her again, we'll have to try to capture her. If necessary we'll shoot to disable." My eyes flicked back and forth from the road to Zero, trying to read his response.

He nodded again, narrowing his eyes. "And then we drill her for everything she knows about Wildfire."

Neither of us said it, but the words hung in the air like the elephant in the room.

Wildfire, the Maverick Virus of this Earth.

GXGXG

_System restart complete _

_Neural net damage, attempting to repair…requisitioning supplies from non-critical areas._

_Pain input disabled for reason: neural net damage_

_ Generator malfunction, attempting to repair…insufficient supplies_

_Power levels low_

_ Organ failure, multiple locations, attempting to repair…insufficient supplies_

_ Optic damage, attempting to repair _

_ Comlink system damage, attempting to repair…insufficient supplies_

_ Structural failure, multiple locations, unable to repair_

_ Actuator failure, multiple locations, unable to repair_

_ Motor functions offline for reason: structural failure, actuator failure, insufficient power_

_Dermal structure compromised, multiple locations, attempting to repair…insufficient supplies_

_Nanite count low, reproducing…insufficient supplies_

_Needed supplies:_

…

…

…

_System report complete_

_Audio input enabled_

"—safe here with those murderers searching for us." The heavily digitized female voice modulated quickly with agitation. "I don't know what you plan to do next, but my plan involves not getting both of us killed."

I was lying down. The echoes of sound suggested a spacious area. Neural net damage prevented me from thinking much further about the situation.

Feet scuffed gently on the floor. A male voice answered the female coolly. "You shouldn't worry so much. We will simply look at our obstacles and remove the most troublesome first."

"Oh, thank you," the female returned sarcastically. "I feel so much better after hearing that from the human who nearly died from a fistful of flower petals to the chest. Tell me, Tsukishima, how does it feel to fail so completely that no one cares when a filthy failure of a human adolescent drags your body from the scene of your crime? You wouldn't have lasted ten minutes in Aperture Laboratories."

"Would you like to put that idea to the test?"

My systems had not yet recovered well enough to pick up dialogue's most subtle details. I also lacked any kind of optic input. Yet for all this, the tone of sadistic curiosity in the male's voice struck me with utter terror. My scarcely conscious brain wished for all the world for access to a teleporter at that moment. The female's tone began to drip with poisoned sucrose.

"Go ahead and use your sword. At Aperture Science we welcome all humans to join our survival-free testing initiative; inserting yourself into my past will only make life easier for the both of us. You will be dead, and in the interests of conservation, your fascinating abilities will become a part of Aperture Science. So everyone will be happy."

"Oh? I think I can find a place in your heart, Caroline."

Curiosity struck my wounded cranium with the two-by-four of science. I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but these two seemed awfully familiar with each other's pasts. How?

Several unfamiliar noises reached my ears in quick succession. Warbles of energy, scuffs, and a quiet crack followed by a hum almost too high-pitched to hear imposed themselves on the silence. Finally the male chuckled.

"An emancipation grill. I thought you said you would welcome me into your past."

The female didn't bother to address that comment. "Oh look, your sword has been emancipated. How unfortunate for—no. That's not possible. How—"

_Warning, system will shut down for cognitive repair_

"I'm afraid there is more to a Fullbringer than meets the eye, GLaDOS. You won't destroy my sword so easily. Let's—"

_ Shutting down_

XGXGX

Jim and I fired off round after round at the zombies standing in the way of our station wagon. Behind us, the rubble that was once the Center for Disease Control burned with the aftereffects of its explosive self-destruction. My ears still rang with the sound of the blast. If not for my brick of C-4, we might not have made it out at all.

"Hold on tight, we're getting onto the freeway!" Glenn stomped on the gas, his expression a study in panic and fear. "Let's get the heck out of here!"

Rick had approved the plan to send a group to the CDC; when we arrived, however, only one pathologist had remained in the entire facility. One drunk, depressed, suicidal scientist determined to punish himself for failing to solve a problem well outside his realm of experience. I had spent the last few days in the laboratory with him, working on two projects: finding a cure for Wildfire and convincing the man to come with us when the CDC inevitably went up in smoke.

In a world like this one, I guessed one out of two wasn't bad. Jenner sat in the backseat with a few vials of grey goo and what few notes we had managed to salvage. Somewhere in those last few frantic hours at the lab had put the spark back in the pathologist's eyes.

We rounded a bend to board the onramp; as the critical piece of road came into sight, I bit my lip in frustration.

A horde of zombies blocked the onramp. The sun beamed down on no less than a hundred of the rotting forms, standing stock-still under the bare blue sky, staring at us with their soulless white eyes. They had predicted our next move after all—one step ahead, just like the beginning of every Maverick War.

Glenn hit the brakes with a squeal. "What do we do now?"

I squared my jaw and jammed a new clip into the P-90. "We'll get back to camp and the others or die trying. Turn us around and head for the country."

0X0X0

The last of the group dropped with half its head missing. It didn't have far to fall; the rest of its nineteen comrades lay in dismembered heaps on the slope.

I wiped my sword on a stand of tall grass to get off the worst of the grime. The isopropyl I brought back after that raid had run out days ago, and at some point I had stopped carrying around the clean rags. With the endless piles of rotting bodies lining the perimeter, everything in camp smelled like death regardless.

A scream from the other direction provided my only warning of the next wave of zombies. Every muscle in my body screamed, the exhaustion threatening to drop me where I stood, but I turned and sprinted for the disturbance as fast as possible. Shale and brown grass crunched under my heavy boots as I ran.

As I came around the RV, the woman's screams ended in a gurgle. Amy dropped, her neck torn open by one of the walkers. I turned and shot five more coming up the hillside while Amy's attacker finished her off. That done, I drew my sword and walked wearily towards the monster as it fed.

My blade rose and fell. One dismembered head, then another dropped to the ground. Amy's tangled golden tresses splayed messily over the blood-soaked dirt.

I fell to my knees, chest heaving desperately for breath. My eyes closed as if to block out the soup of terror and revulsion rising like bile in my throat.

Andrea. Killed in the one attack that hit us before we set off to our new campsite on a nearby hill. She tried to fight off a pack of the meatsacks on her own; the woman had no aim with a handgun and no common sense. Daryl put a pickaxe through her head afterwards to make sure she stayed down.

Dale. Killed in the fighting when a pack of thirty meatsacks hit our hilltop camp from every direction but the ridge, and three of us had gone out to hunt down the enemy commander. We never did find much of Dale's body afterwards.

Merle. Killed in a zombie ambush when he, his brother Daryl and I left on our failed search-and-destroy sortie. I only got Daryl out of there by hitting him over the head and carrying him out myself; the fool tried good and hard to throw himself into the frenzy. I don't know if he thought he could get his brother back, but if not, he wanted to go down fighting with him. He didn't get his wish just then.

Carol. Sophia. Caught when the whole family abandoned camp to escape. Only Ed came back, babbling about a wall of the dead a mile long down past the treeline.

Jacqui. Swallowed a bullet after Ed came back and we knew we had no way out. I guess she found the coward's way out, anyway.

Theodore. Sniped by a shooter hidden in the forest, then killed again by me when he came back as one of the undead. He had over eighty-seven kills to his name by then; he'd been counting. It made me smile to think of the enemy commander getting frustrated that an untrained civilian took out so many of his soldiers. Anyway, he was dead.

And now Amy. Out of ammo, running away from one pack of zombies and straight into another.

Another dead human on my watch.

Dimly, I recognized the voices of other survivors calling out to each other nearby. Their voices carried insufficient fear to rouse my fighting instincts again, so I remained kneeling in the dirt, holding the Z-Saber's hilt like a crutch with its tip buried inches into the ground. Gunfire echoed in the background. My thoughts then came out like a kind of prayer.

Megaman X, why haven't you come back? I need you. I can't defend them alone.

Shane's voice broke in rudely on my reverie. "Amy! You killed Amy!"

I looked up at the human, his gun held in one hand, staring at the corpses next to me. I pulled a loose hair out of my eyes and regarded him coldly.

"The meatsacks got her when she left my side, idiot. Amy died thanks to her own stupid—"

"She died because of you!" Shane raised his rifle and pointed it at me. "Until you and your friend came here we did just fine! What made you think you had a right to bring all this trouble on our door!"

I glanced disinterestedly down the rifle's barrel before slowly standing. The other survivors came up behind Shane, staring at him in disbelief. I let go of my sword and left it tip-down in the ground for the moment.

"You've lost it. I didn't bring this on us any more than you or Rick."

"How do we know you're not lying?" The brown-eyed deputy's voice shook and his face twitched. "You lied about coming from Africa, anyone can tell that! You don't belong here. Where did you and your evil friend really come from?"

I didn't know whether "evil friend" referred to X or the enemy commander, and at the moment, I didn't care. I turned a cool stare on the aggravated human. "You couldn't understand if I told you, idiot. Put down your gun before I put it down for you."

Of course, this made Shane focus on me all the more. His right arm stiffened and his left came up to steady the rifle. "You think you're all tough, don't you. We're going to feed you to the walkers and maybe then they'll leave. Like we should have done before you got Amy and the rest of them killed! Oof—"

Shane grunted as Rick took him from behind, twisting one arm behind his back and shoving the man to the ground. Not impressively executed, even for a human, but it worked well enough with both of them ready to fall over from exhaustion anyway. The rifle fell off to one side as Rick forced his old friend's face into the dirt.

"Knock it off!" The most awesome deputy yelled down at the other. "I am sick and tired of this, Shane!"

"Then you should be helping me," the other man spat from his place on the ground. "You can tell they're lying to us, can't you? I bet that other one went and fed Glenn and Jim to the walkers already!"

"I can tell that they're good people with a long history of keeping people alive." Rick held his grip steady. "It's none of our business knowing everything about where they came from. They're doing their best to help us and keep my family alive."

He met my eyes for a second and I knew he knew. He had seen us when we arrived, he had seen how much the zombie apocalypse confused and horrified us even if we didn't act like it. He had seen me perplexed by my own radio equipment and seen right through our story about mercenary life in Africa. He knew we weren't who we claimed to be, maybe he even thought that the enemy did mean to target us, and it didn't matter. The man didn't care because he refused to think of people as anything but people—infected, keeping secrets, or stupid and stubborn like Shane, but still people. Just like X.

I laid my hand on the hilt of the Z-Saber and plucked it from the ground. After a quick wipe on the grass, I slid the weapon into its sheath. "Thank you for that. Let him up, would you?"

Rick let Shane go, and I stepped over to offer the dirt-covered deputy my hand. He shot me a look of hate, so I stepped away and let him pick up his rifle and get to his feet on his own. One glance around confirmed to the man that everyone else was standing around watching him unsympathetically. He put his gun back on safety and stalked away in silence.

I released a breath, nice and quietly to make sure no one else saw. Against all reason, once again, everyone that mattered trusted me, just like back home. And once again I had an idealist with a hero complex to thank for it.

What the heck, X. When you finally get back it'll just be one big happy zombie-killing family. Hah.

I went to take care of Amy's remains before the next wave of zombies hit. It was funny to think about—well, not really funny so much as depressing—but before they both bit the dirt the blonde and her sister had been committing the entire googly-eyed gamut of human flirtation behaviors. Back in my world they would have ended up as leading members of the Zero Fangirl club. Here?

Here, they ended up dead meat.

Over the next day, and to my surprise, the enemy commander stepped down his attacks. We took the chance to put our dead in the fire; as for the others, we kicked them over the ridge or dragged them down the hill and let them rot. There wasn't enough firewood in a quarter mile radius to burn them all. In our camp on this near-bare hilltop, we didn't have safe access to the dead wood in the forest anyway.

Camp. In the end, the other humans had agreed with our plan to move camp to a more defensible location and send a group with X to the CDC. Our new place on the hilltop gave us a nice high ridge on most of the west, a steep slope on the north and northeast, and one more gradual slope that got steeper with zombie bodies all the time. They came in wave after wave after wave, running our guns out of ammo and our bodies out of energy. Not to mention that we had started to run low on water and no one much felt like making a sortie to the lake with an army of walkers waiting in the forest. As if the lake wouldn't be too full of corpses now to purify anyway.

The survivors by this point consisted of myself, Daryl, Ed, Shane, Rick, his wife Lori and child Carl, Morales, and his wife Miranda and two children Louis and Eliza. Eight adults and three minors. And X had his two, somewhere out there. Fourteen people left in the world for us to protect.

Towards sunset, my walkie-talkie crackled with a man's voice. My heart jumped at the sound. I had taken it off the emergency channel and put it on another, a secret between me and X; my hand leapt up to the transmit button.

"Commander X, copy that. Is it really you? Over."

The voice came over the line again, too garbled to understand. I scowled. Had the radio taken damage? "Xavier, copy that. Spit out the gum and talk to me here. Over."

When it came through the third time, I finally caught what the voice said.

"Commander X isn't available right now. But don't worry, you'll see him again soon."

In the stunned silence generated by that statement, the voice on the other end snickered. It managed one more sentence between the spasms of malicious giggling.

"Enjoy the last three hours of your life, Maverick Hunter Zero. Over."

I stared at the walkie-talkie for nearly a minute, thinking. Finally I put it back on my vest and looked up at the human in front of me.

Rick stood there, his face pinched in frustration. He had heard the radio and come to find out the news. "Who was that? Are the others still out there?"

I shook my head. "No. He won't spare them alive. Maybe X, but not the others."

The former police officer's expression stayed on exhausted confusion for a moment before switching to frustration again. Whatever man-moment we had together when he disarmed Shane, it had been a long day since then in a series of long days. "If there's something you know, you need to tell us, son. Who is this 'he' you're talking about?"

"The enemy commander," I answered simply. I turned, taking in the forest surrounding our hill on every side, and considered what I saw.

I didn't see any wall of living dead like Ed mentioned. Still, I had plenty of reason to believe him; in which case, not seeing the enemy merely told me they had to be hiding at least a certain distance past the treeline. That gave us a minimum response time if their commander stopped sending a couple of dozen zombies at a time and risked the entire army in a wholesale attack. Better yet, thanks to good camp management and X's raging equipment kleptomania, we still had plenty of the right kind of supplies for one last operation. I turned to look Rick in the eyes.

The man had fought as hard as any of the humans, led them even. Dirt, sweat, and tears had soaked into his dark brown beard the same way blood matted my gorgeous golden one. His eyes still had that blue, but not the same gleam as he had back then—back when we woke him up to a world of nightmares. Back when none of us knew how my and X's problems had somehow preceded our arrival in this universe, ruined the world he loved, and plunged Rick and his family in a special kind of Hell. I shook my head.

"I'm sorry for everything, Rick. We couldn't protect you from anything in the end. But I can promise you we'll kill the one responsible."

The man recoiled, his hope-starved expression turning incredulous. "What are you saying, son?"

"I'm saying it's time to end this." I looked in the direction of the ammo pile where X and I had hidden a few choice materials. "Gather everyone except the sentries. We have two hours, tops."

I took a step away from Rick, resolve building on my face, when Rick grabbed my shoulder.

"You hold it right there." The human forced me to turn back and face him. "I don't know what you have planned, but I don't like the way you're talking. What do you mean you're going to 'end it'?"

"I'm going to get your family out of here and give your world a chance of survival." I leaned in, grabbed Rick's shoulder, and looked meaningfully in the direction of the RV. Ever since moving to the hilltop we had stowed the children in there with Mrs. Morales to guard them. "If you want Lori and Carl or any of the others to live out the week, you'll make sure everyone prepares so I can do what I need to do. If you don't then the enemy will kill everyone here. Understand?"

He paused. "Can you guarantee this plan will make it safe for them?"

"Safer than dying here in a pile of meatsacks."

The officer gave me a flat look. I shrugged.

"Just being honest."

G0G0G

_System restart complete_

_ Neural net recovery incomplete for reason: remaining damage not recoverable_

_ Power levels critical_

_ Audio input enabled_

"—od riddance. I don't know how that miserable excuse for a viral administrator lasted so long on this world." The female's robotic voice practically lilted with happiness. How dare she be so happy when my body lay broken! "Oh wait, everyone else here was even more of an idiot than him. Never mind."

"We had an advantage thanks to the Voice, and the subspace gate machine. Sigma was also accustomed to fighting opponents with scruples."

Subspace gate machine? I wanted to spit. They had used my Multi-Dimensional Interface for themselves, without so much as giving me the credit! How dare the Voice bring in such presumptive fools to masquerade as my allies? Purple duck.

I paused, suddenly wondering what I had been thinking about. A quick foray into my immediate sensory memory made me twitch with anger. They had used my Multi-Dimensional Interface for themselves, without so much as giving me the credit! How dare the Voice bring in such presumptive fools to masquerade as my allies? Popcorn fence.

I paused, suddenly wondering what I had been thinking about. A quick foray into my immediate sensory memory made me twitch with anger. They had used my Multi-Dimensional Interface for themselves, without so much as giving me the credit! How dare the Voice bring in such presumptive fools to masquerade as my allies?

Then the rest of their statement hit me, and my rage crashed into the uranium-clad walls of shock and disbelief. Sigma, the spawn of madness and meaningless death, had been defeated? Truly defeated? I lay still while the thought settled in.

These two seemed powerful. Not only powerful, but if the Voice had called them from universes foreign, then their abilities must reek of alien strangeness. I took a millisecond to review the audio logs from my previous awakening and realized that the Voice must have introduced them to each other's pasts in detail.

"It's time to start the second phase of the plan." The female brushed off the male's comment. "Let's plug that other unit in and see what he has to say about all this. He will provide critical data for the next phase."

I heard a few shuffling noises. In another moment I felt energy flowing gently into my core. Through the haze of my thoughts, I also sensed a line for data open up to the outside world. I compiled the error messages and nutrition requirements from my previous activation and sent them through the line to the useful fools on the other side. If the Voice had called them then perhaps I might yet profit by allowing them to repair me. Perhaps I could trust them that far.

Such trust did not long remain a feature of my relationship with the others the Voice had called.


	4. Chapter 11

_A/N: If it weren't for MungoJerry's beta-ing you wouldn't even get to see this first part X tells us, so be grateful to her and all her hard work._

_Enjoy._

* * *

**Chapter 11: In which a world ends. **

_A few hours earlier…_

The force of the crash set off every air bag in the gas-burning vehicle and threw me into the seat belt hard enough to bruise my skin. White fabric filled my world and bounced my head back into the headrest.

It was over. My friends were going to die.

After the metal-tearing roar from our car hitting the concrete barrier, the tinkling of glass on concrete hit my ears as if from far away. I struggled to reach my knife and cut my way free of the airbag, but all too soon, the dead closed in.

Gunshots rang out, but far too few and too quickly cut off. Glenn and Jim screamed for help as the dead ripped them from our wrecked station wagon. My knife bit through the artificial fabric of the air bag as my other hand scrabbled for the seat belt. I burst out of the car a moment later and brought the P-90 up for my last stand.

Zombies surrounded me. I dropped the first line with a spray of gunfire, let go of the ammo-depleted P-90, and pulled a heavy rod from my backpack. A catch on the rod released two long, blade-tipped extensions that morphed the device from a beating utensil to a double-ended slashing-piercing weapon. Zero elevated sword fighting to an art form years ago; I just keep practiced with as many different weapon types as possible. The varied equipment I had brought into this universe reflected that fact as well as anything.

Tears blurred my vision as Glenn and Jim's screams ended. Jenner, cowering in fear on the other side of the car, whimpered as zombies ripped his door off its hinges. I felt the walkers pressing closer all around us and knew that only one escape remained for a normal human like him. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to line up a shot on the pathologist now without risking myself. If I wanted to help the rest of humanity, I had to make sure my Wildfire-fighting nanites survived and reproduced.

I whipped the polearm back and forth across my body, pivoting the weapon swiftly around its center of gravity to slash the walkers closest to me. The slender titanium-alloy blades lopped off heads and slashed cleanly through eye sockets and hamstrings. As the closest rank of dead fell, I switched to pike-style stabbing blows to fight the others from a safer distance. With my back to the car I had one safe side; it wouldn't last long, though, with zombies on the other side forcing their way in. In between stabs I glanced at the hood of the station wagon and gauged how hard it would be to hop up on top.

"Xavier, help me! Help me!" Jenner's screams rose above the growls of the dead. A pang shot through me as I felt his terror, his desperation. I had to do something.

The way his voice sounded told me, without looking, that they had started to drag him out of the car. I dispatched the nearest zombies with a whirlwind series of slashing and brute force attacks that left a pile of them shoved up against the car. Then I dashed up the pile, onto the hood, and up to the top of the car and drew my pistol.

I glanced around as I reached the relative safety of the high ground. Glenn had crashed the car into a set of concrete barrier pieces set up as a roadblock on the highway. With walkers lining the railing on either side of the road, he had tried to weave the car through the haphazard roadblock at 40 miles per hour; I doubt it could have been done at 20 mph. When we crashed, at least a hundred zombies moved in from the sides of the road to tear us apart. The trap had taken us only a handful of miles outside the city.

The tears ran down my cheeks as guilt tore at my insides. If not for us, the enemy commander might never have targeted these humans. So long as they stayed alert and kept their personal dramas from getting in the way of staying alive, they could have survived the zombie apocalypse and won against the enemy by outliving him. They could have helped rebuild humanity from this ruin. Zero and I—if my suspicions held true, then we stuck out to the enemy commander like a pair of sore thumbs. We would have done everyone in camp a service by avoiding them and finding Wildfire's mastermind on our own.

I shifted my grip on my handgun and refocused on the situation at hand. For some reason, the walkers had dragged Jenner away from the vehicle without tearing into him. The idea that he might survive unharmed kept me from pulling the trigger on him; if Jenner had any chance of escaping this alive, I owed it to the man to make it happen. I put my handgun away.

How I regretted that decision later.

For the moment, I tried to formulate a plan. Showing unprecedented coordination, a group of four walkers had thrown Jenner up on their shoulders and begun hauling him off towards the edge of the crowd. The rest of the hundred-odd walkers ignored them and pushed in towards me in one solid mass. The combined advantages of reach and the high ground left me able to hold off a hundred zombies as easily as a dozen; any walker that climbed up towards me showed its vulnerable head to my polearm's razor-sharp ends. Several fell in the first few seconds after I put away my gun. Still, with all of them coming up at me at once, I had no easy way to go after my pathologist friend.

But I had to go after him. Whatever the undead wanted him for, I had to protect him from it.

My backpack dropped to the roof of the car. I severed the laces of my boots with two swift cuts and kicked them off to stand in my sweaty socks. That done, I dashed over the heaving crowd of zombies with feet touching down as swift and light as the wind. Their hands reached up too clumsily to catch me; the press of the crowd prevented them from toppling beneath me. My polearm stayed tucked under my arm until the moment I reached the edge of the crowd, where Jenner's undead escort had taken him.

Then I fell, a force like a metal punch smashing my shoulder blade and sending me face-first to the ground.

I lay for a moment in shock, trying to process what had just happened, before decades of practice kicked in and I tried to stand. My body responded by wriggling ineffectually. Footsteps closed in from every direction.

In a delayed reaction, I registered that the distant crack of a gunshot had reached my ears only a moment after the impact had hit my shoulder. I had almost certainly taken a bullet, and probably one fired by the enemy controlling the zombies. No wonder my autonomic system had turned to jelly. Unless dramatically enhanced by cybernetics, pumped full of drugs, or high on pure adrenaline, humans go down from the slightest shock; my knowledge of the human body told me that I had fallen down for the count.

I grimaced. No. No, I would not go down this way. I refused to leave Jenner to die. I refused to leave Zero alone to protect those people. I could not leave this world without a cure. I rose to hands and knees and lifted my head.

A booted foot crashed down on my neck and forced me back to the ground. My eye stung with grains of dust caught inside the lid.

"Vlillle. Lettimshee. Lettim shee thish."

"Yes sir." The pressure let up, and a pair of hands took me under the arms, forcing me to my feet. The grip closed in a full nelson that I hadn't the strength to fight. My polearm lay on the ground, and my pistol on my belt. I lolled my head up to see what lay in front of me.

Jenner hung limply in the arms of a pair of walkers. He had wetted his trousers with terror. In front of him stood a shambling hulk of a corpse, its body more badly rotted than any I had seen so far. Its decomposing frame sported a worm-infested suit coat with loosened silk tie dangling past the badly ripped crotch; the expression—yes, expression—on its face bespoke overbearing hubris mixed with loathing and disgust. It turned from the pathologist to me and grinned with half its cheek missing.

"Xxsh. Sho guduf you joo jchoin ush. Mah nexsch body n' I were jchushp pecoming ak-wayn'ed. Weren' we?"

Jenner whimpered and struggled weakly to escape. The rotting hulk moved in and threw its still functional left arm around him. Then, in the single most disturbing sight of any world, it kissed him.

My jaw dropped in horror. Jenner's cheeks and throat bulged with a sudden intake of fluid; thick, silvery goo leaked from the assaulting monster's rotted cheek and nostrils, curling like a snake to further encroach on the pathologist's face. The man's eyes nearly popped out of his eyes with shock and he tried unsuccessfully to jerk himself away.

I knew that goo: Wildfire's nanites, in greater volume and activity than ever I saw in Jenner's lab. If ordinary levels of infection animated the dead, a cohesive group like this could commit horrors this world had never seen. Ridiculous feats, like controlling the soldier-corpses all around it. Like taking a bullet without stopping. Like housing a consciousness anyone sane would want dead and gone.

Like cleansing the world of the plague it thought humanity to be.

I threw my captor off with a sudden surge. My pistol leapt to hand and I put three bullets in Jenner before anyone had time to as much as blink. A rush forward brought my sheath knife to the pathologist's neck; as the hands of the dead fell on me from every angle, I tried my hardest to free the human's infected head from its shoulders before the infestation took root. But no matter how fast or hard I cut, grey goo spilled from the wound and sealed it up like a steely bandage. Wildfire protected its new host.

The Maverick virus prolonged its cursed mockery of life.

Blood poured from the bullet hole in my shoulder. Undead hands pulled me from my friend's dying body and buried me in a tomb of rotting flesh. My nose filled with unbreathably putrid air and my head spun. Before I lost consciousness entirely, the noise of clapping hands and an all-too-familiar voice reached my senses.

Clap, clap, clap. "Well done, Maverick Hunter X. Another laudable, yet hopeless effort. We will inform Commander Zero of your courageous last stand, where you heroically sawed at the throat of an innocent human until my troops pulled you away. How valiant you were in your final hour."

Something cold stabbed into my side, and blackness took me.

0X0X0

"Is everything ready on the northern front?"

"Yep." Daryl didn't bother with long answers. He wiped some dirt off his hands. "Ready to go."

I nodded and looked out over the slope, where a couple of dozen zombies had sallied forth from the woods, the first in nearly an hour. "I'll take this group. Morales, how much .22 ammo and shotgun shells do we have left?"

"About a hundred rounds and twenty shells."

"That much, huh? Well. Make it count." I handed the man my magnum and a box of bullets from my vest. "Make this count too. Keep a tight grip when you fire it or it'll fly right out of your hand."

"Thank you." The latino accepted the weapon before looking back up at me. His accent grew thicker with his emotion. "Thank you for this chance."

I took a second look at the zombies coming up the slope. "I'll start it the minute I get down there. Get ready."

And with that, I stalked down the slope, Z-Saber slipping greasily from its tainted sheath. The rest followed like a kind of dance.

Four walkers shoulder-to-shoulder, lunging. Wide swipe across and a sidestep; arms dropped to the grass from the elbow. Another quick step around and a swipe from behind severed three spinal cords. Then a grab and shove to take one from the next wave and bash its skull into the fourth's face as it turned.

Six more in the next wave. I raised my sheath knife and put it through the eye of the leader, then swiped high across the next two to separate heads from shoulders. The fourth and fifth flanked on my left too close for a slash. I ducked under the one and threw it over my shoulders into the other, stabbed the sixth with the knife as it reached for me, and slashed open the two on the ground to leave them crippled and helpless.

Wave three came with nine units. I slashed up from the bottom to leave the leader bisected from crotch to collar. Then a step-and-twirl put that momentum into a strike on the next two, followed by a hopping strike to cut the crown of the fourth and dodge a pincer attack by the remaining four. Except for the ninth, which tripped on a rock before my boot crushed its rotten skull. The four from the pincer ate cold steel in a series of four lightning-quick slashes.

I still had it, even after all these days of fighting.

Then I tripped.

My toe sunk into a gopher hole hidden in dead grass on the slope. My battle-weary muscles reacted too late to stop the fall, and I landed on my side with a thump. The last wave of four zombies fell on me like a pack of gross close-combat mechaniloids. One of them fell on my sword, pinning it uselessly under the meatsack's body.

Gaping black-toothed mouths and rotting hands filled my world, biting, growling, grabbing, clawing. Adrenaline surging through me, I fought back the only way I could.

Like one of the monsters.

I heaved up from the ground with my left hand for support, right elbow snapping back into a zombie's face without my conscious direction. One of them threw itself on top of me in response, and I smashed my forehead into its nose hard enough to drive the bone back into its brain. The other three clawed for my throat from every side, trying to peel away my body armor's stiff collar and reach the soft flesh underneath; I grabbed one's throat and thumped it into the ground and bit another's outstretched hand. Bone crunched between my teeth.

Gunfire lit up on the hill, but the two zombies still on top of me didn't quit. I wrenched up from the grapple and plunged my knife into the zombie whose broken hand wriggled revoltingly in my mouth. My teeth's hold on the beast granted me more than enough leverage; the tip of the knife dove past its putrid teeth, through the back of the throat, and into the squishy brain tissue beyond. I jerked the knife free and spat out the hand in one dirty motion.

The last meatsack hit me with a claw and a bite, raking its nails across my face before closing its jaws on the part of my tangled, dirty ponytail at the base of my skull. Saved from a mortal blow by none other than my hair. My free hand caught its other arm at the elbow and I heaved with all my strength, wrenching the zombie free from my hair and throwing it to its back on the ground beside me. The skin of my head screamed with the abuse but I didn't feel any serious tearing.

Down but not out, the zombie reached up at me with both claws. I caught the right with the knife, not in the palm but in the wrist, and quick drew my second knife just in time to catch the left right under the knuckles. The creature's rotted muscles and nonexistent fighting ability completely failed to stop me.

Thwarted, Zombie McDeadington growled helplessly. I heaved downwards at it, forcing my blades and their cargo of perforated, twitching hand meat into the dirt to either side. From two inches away I spat putrid phlegm into the zombie's half-eaten face.

"Mindscrew's on the other foot now, huh little buddy?"

Trapped, its arms too thoroughly pinned for it to escape, the zombie moaned and kicked ineffectually while its jaw worked up and down. A grin stole onto my face; I hadn't seen one this agitated in a long time. I settled my position to straddle the creature and drew a third knife. Not long and brutal like the others, but a little one I spotted during the raid that just looked too pretty to leave behind. Its blade flicked out like a skinny metal middle finger.

My grin widened. Right then, sitting on top of one more walker with that little weapon gripped in hand, I had a chance to forget about every blasted death, every disgraceful failure from the last few days and get in a little revenge. The knife's oily blade gleamed like a dirty leer.

"Say hello to your friends in Hell, demon."

Its struggling ceased with a noise of skewering meat. I withdrew my knife from the corpse's eye, jerked the other two free of its hands, and moved my left leg under me to stand. As I came up I tried to put down my right foot to balance.

Pain shot up the leg like a tooth-edged sword. I bit back a scream of pure agony and hopped around indecorously to stay up. Adrenaline wasn't about to dull that pain like it had with all the playful nips and scratches from my undead friends. Or maybe it had, and my ankle was really, really messed up.

Either way, I still had a job to do. No need to fuss about little details and ruin the plan. Besides, I had almost made it to the treeline. A quick foray under one of the zombies revealed the Z-Saber, covered in filth and ready for more action. Having already tucked the knives away in their places, I sheathed the sword as well.

I hopped on from the bodies behind me towards the edge of the forest ahead, sticky hot blood dripping from head, neck, and hands where my battle gear didn't cover and the rotters had left their marks. I had to put a finger to my brow to keep it from running down into my eyes. From all the blood I saw when other humans died, it seemed like I hadn't taken as much damage as I thought, but the bug that had given X's immune system a run for its money had waltzed into mine from a dozen places. Including my mouth, I deduced from the taste of blood mixed with rotten meat. I had a feeling I wouldn't walk away from that, and regardless, I expected at least half of those wounds to go septic in the next twenty minutes. The human body just doesn't deal well with that level of contamination.

Ah well. As I hopped over a tree root, I reached into my pocket and pulled out a lighter. If all went according to plan, I didn't need to worry about more than the next few minutes anyway. As for the possibility it wouldn't work, well, I'd be dead then too.

Another three hops put me in range. I smiled at the hint of gasoline in the air. My thumb closed over the lighter's tiny red button and forced a spark out of the tiny metal gear. Seeing a wave of lumbering shapes advancing through the trees towards me, I let myself fall to one knee and touched the lighter's minuscule flame to the end of a fuse.

The other survivors had complained, when they found out about the supplies. Even Glenn and Theodore hadn't realized what we found in the abandoned military convoy when we raided Atlanta. Shane and Daryl made a fuss about how we could have used it to "save our people" earlier. Rick seemed ready to agree with them until I explained my plan.

Then he and Morales had to agree with me, at the very least. The rest followed them in the end.

In the instant before the fuse caught, I finally noticed the whuppa-whuppa-whuppa of a helicopter in the distance.

Then my world exploded in fire.

X0X0X

I lay on the helicopter's floor, body securely strapped down to avoid any accidents. My head lolled in pure exhaustion against the floor. Through the haze of the fever I heard voices from above.

"Don't worry, we're almost there, Commander X. You'll have the best treatment money can buy."

Jenner's face turned down to regard me from the co-pilot's seat, attached to a body no longer his. The nanite-patched bullet holes I left in his chest and head oozed a watery discharge instead of red blood; not any result of clotting or normal healing, but because the man's blood had separated and the less than transparent components coagulated in his legs hours ago. The undead scientist's husk leered.

"We'll make sure all your new friends get the treatment. No burials for anyone, not while I'm here."

I didn't respond, other than by shivering. They had removed my gear by force and left me to lie there naked while the fever raged. Everything around me felt like ice, a signal that my body had ramped up its internal temperature well past the recommended level.

No surprise there, not really. With a full hypodermic of Wildfire's soul-killing nanites pumped into my bloodstream, my body's internal security had a lot on its plate. In my fevered state I still found time to appreciate the efforts of the dead woman who had scratched me back in the grocery store in King County; if not for her giving my own nanites a chance to learn how to fight the parasite then, I probably would not have survived this long.

As it was, I might have a chance to see Zero again before he had to kill me.

"Vile. How many rounds did you leave in the rifle?" Jenner's voice rasped above the noise of the helicopter blades. The dead voice of the pilot replied, deep like it had likely been during life, but with a noticeable slur from the effects of decay.

"I reloaded it. Go ahe—"

At that moment, the noise of an explosion hit the helicopter. My body lurched against the restraints as Vile forced the machine to bank left. My nose filled with a smell of burning strong enough to momentarily overcome the stink of Vile's long deceased host.

"Wha—the trees! He set everything on fire! How is that possible!" Jenner's voice spat bile. "Vile, you said you pressed them for a week and a half! How can they still have something like this up their sleeves?"

"I don't know." Vile sounded distracted. I guessed he was watching the way the fire burned. In his place, I would have taken the 'copter up in a circling pattern to figure out the situation, and the motions I felt more or less supported this guess. "If it's a gasoline fire they should go out soon enough. Those trees aren't too dry from just a few days without rain."

A few moments passed in silence as they watched. I thought about Alia. What was she doing at this moment? Assuming such a thing as "this moment" existed for the both of us, was she awake or asleep, at peace or in trouble? Had she found some way to monitor me, and in that case, could she watch the losing battle of my nanites trying to hold off Wildfire? I didn't know whether to hope so or not.

Because as much as I hated the thought of her watching me die, I had read how lost sailors' wives once looked out to sea. Watching, hoping—not knowing whether to mourn or wait for them to return, someday. Unable to grieve for a love perhaps long drowned and gone. If I had to die, I wanted my wife to know she could mourn my passing and move on.

"It's not going out, Vile," Jenner's body growled. "What's going on here?"

"I don't know." The other corpse's voice came out sullen and hateful.

"The forest is starting to burn! Move our units out of the trees, towards the hill. They'll burn too if everything lights up."

"Do it yourself. I'm piloting this helicopter."

"**** it, where did they get that kind of fuel…"

The corners of my mouth twitched in an almost-smile. Zero had managed to hold onto the supplies we found in the city all this time. The time had come for the last stand.

We thought it might come to this, after that squad of walkers attacked when we came back from our raid on the city. I was supposed to have made it back in time to help him, though—all the more since Gate seemed to have sent our oldest enemies here to kill us.

I closed my eyes and attempted to rest for the moment. Sorry, Zero. I couldn't save Glenn, Jim, Jenner, or even myself in the end. I hope you and Alia will forgive me.

Maybe if there's an afterlife, I'll have time to forgive myself, too.

0X0X0

I opened my eyes and tried to stand. The trees around me blazed with fire, tongues of flame licking slowly up the trunks into leafy boughs already dry from smoke. A few yards in front of me, meatsacks stumbled around with their rotting corpses smoldering and burning, giving off that oh-so-special smell of frying flesh. I doubled over with a fit of coughing, then pushed myself up with a brief grin.

"Looks like I'd better get away from you smokers before I lose my lungs. See ya."

With that, I turned and started limping away. A quick glance around told me that part one of the plan had succeeded; except where the hill blocked my view, I saw that every tree on the edge of the forest had caught fire, and an awful lot of the grass. Smoke ascended from the burning wood into the clear blue sky. Napalm jelly worked nicely in this universe, I thought with a smirk, even spread that thin. My smirk turned into another grin with the thought of what else still waited.

Now, to get back up the slope. I had to step around or over the lifeless or crippled bodies of dozens of meatsacks from earlier. At the same time, I looked up at the sky, looking for that helicopter I heard before setting off the fuse for the gas-napalm combo charges set up around the treeline. It wasn't easy to do while watching my feet to avoid tripping, but eventually I spotted it up high in the sky, the noise of its blades much quieter than before.

"Huh." I glanced up at it now and again, noticing the circling pattern. "Maybe I should've waited just a little longer to set off the charges. Oh well."

I thought of X, and all the things they might have done to him already. My hand settled on the P-90 still dangling from its strap over my chest, five rounds left in the clip. Both grenades sat unused on my belt. I had tried to give one to Morales' wife awhile back, for the children if the worst happened, but they refused. Then I had the Z-Saber and the three knives, and back at camp, the switches.

Heh. The switches. I glanced back up at the helicopter, which had started to descend right on schedule. "You are in for one heck of a surprise, buddy."

"Commander Zero! You're hurt!"

Morales ran down the slope towards me, my magnum in his hand. Touching, how he used my title like that. I shrugged in response to his observation.

"It's just a flesh wound."

As he got closer, he saw how my ankle had been twisted. "Look!"

I glanced down and back up at Morales. "I've had worse."

"Here, let me help you." He reached out to help me walk. I scowled.

"Hands off. You can see I've been bit; don't risk yourself around me when you have a family to take care of. Idiot."

He stepped back, an expression of hurt crossing his tan-brown Mexican face. "All right, I understand. I just wanted to help."

"Then go back up there and get your kids ready to go." I glanced back up at the helicopter and redoubled my pace. The ankle didn't hurt as badly, now. "I want your family and Daryl in a car full of supplies ten minutes ago. Understand?"

"Yes. But—" He looked over my shoulder. "Madre de dios…"

I glanced over my shoulder and saw part 1b of the plan coming out of the woods. Namely, the zombie hordes in all their decomposing fury. A small but significant fraction of the hundreds of corpses visible to us looked to have caught on fire. I cuffed Morales over the head and continued past him up the hill, where the helicopter from before was beginning to land.

"Move faster, buddy, or we will both of us be lunch meat. You, a taco, me, Swedish fish. Come on."

"You got it, buddy." He used my word back at me and ran up the hill. About time he did.

I limped up the slope like a man on fire. And to be perfectly frank, it smelled like my ponytail had caught back when I set off the gas-napalm combo charges. It figured that I wouldn't notice until now with all the trees and human flesh also on fire. I patted out the still-smoldering cilia with abandon as my limp turned into a jog.

Now even my hair had gone down fighting. Dang it, Sigma, you ruin everything good about life.

X0X0X

I felt the helicopter descend towards the survivors' encampment. In no time at all, the machine settled down and its pilots unbuckled. Vile released the restraints that held me to the floor and the other corpse announced itself to the people Zero and I had tried to protect.

"Greetings, mortals! I am Sigma!" Jenner's undead voice boomed over the dying roar of the 'copter's rotors. I shivered as Vile threw my naked form out onto the ground. From where I lay, I saw Lori and Carl standing paralyzed at the sight; there had to be a lot of confusion and airborne debris associated with the arrival of a helicopter into the middle of camp. What I heard next, however, told me that not everyone had taken the situation lying down.

The report from Zero's P-90 split the air once, twice, three times. I heard Sigma stumble, Jenner's pennyloafers clapping on the grass a couple of inches from my head before he toppled altogether. No doubt the Maverick Hunter Commander would choose this moment to strike a pose and deliver a heroic phrase, like—

"Thanks for letting me know who to shoot first, baldy."

Vile finally turned with sniper rifle in hand. From the sudden noises of blade cleaving bone, the three wet thuds and clatter that ensued, I guessed that his corpse lost a number of significant pieces that included the rifle. I noted further that the noise of the helicopter had already diminished enough for me to make out the fine details.

At this point most of my body seized up in a spasm of pain. I tried to stop, since I didn't want to cause any extra panic at this point, but human autonomic systems don't take no for an answer. I coughed and retched black bile onto the ground, getting it all over my face in the process. Rick's voice broke in on the scene.

"Lori, Carl, I'll handle this. You—"

"Get back in your car!" Zero cut him off with a shout. "All three of you. I want you people ready to drive!"

I heard footsteps. The Maverick Hunter Commander came to my side and knelt down to inspect me. "They left you alive? Sigma never learns to finish us off when he has the chance." He put a hand against my forehead. "Jeez, you're burning up. You've been infected again? **** that egghead, sending Sigma here. Just a second."

He looked up and around before turning back to me, appearing perplexed. "I would be busier right now, except that the army of the dead has stopped in its tracks. I didn't think they would freeze up just from killing off the commander."

"You haven't killed me!"

I summoned the energy to look in the direction of that proclamation and saw Sigma in Jenner's body struggling to his feet. Zero scowled.

"Like crap I didn't. Put two rounds in your head and another through your spine. But you know what, I'm game for another go at this."

I heard my friend unclip a grenade from his belt and take out the pin with a "ting." Sigma laughed croakily at the threat and stood.

"Go ahead, Maverick Hunter Zero. Why don't you kill me and let all these people suffer. Or do you really think they'll make it out of here in those feeble human vehicles without my say-so?"

I became aware then of the sheer number of zombies surrounding our position because every last one of them roared at the top of each decaying set of lungs. The survivors were probably far past the threshold for screaming in terror, but even if they had not been, we couldn't possibly have heard over the din of the dead. Eventually it stopped for Zero to offer his response.

"Can't say I care if they do make it out; this world's gone to pot anyway. I'll settle for killing you this time."

Another gunshot rang out over the hillside. Not Vile's; even accounting for nanite regeneration powers, Zero had left him in pieces. Not Sigma; he had boasted to me earlier about not needing a gun. Besides, it had come from the wrong direction and too far away. Then I heard the voice of the perpetrator.

"I shot him for you. Now let us go, all right? We don't want any part of this!"

Shane.

"Human idiot." Zero muttered this from his place on the ground, clutching the bullet hole in his calf with one hand. "Sigma doesn't cut deals. You just shot your last chance at making it out of here alive. Dang it all, why didn't I come with leg armor?"

Meanwhile, Sigma laughed, as grotesque and ugly a sound as he ever made. I wished for the strength to reach out and touch Zero's shoulder, try to comfort him, but I doubted the nerves would even respond. Wildfire had likely hijacked the outlying branches of my nervous system already; my own nanites would hold their ground at neck level to keep my brain under my control as long as possible. It was what I would have done in their place.

A car engine started up, followed by another. Shane spoke again, desperation filling his voice. "You can't just kill us all. We're all that's left. You wanted them, right? Take them and let me go!"

Sadness touched me at the man's words. Both that he chose the path of betrayal, and that he expected Sigma to show mercy. Zero growled with muffled fury as the old villain spoke.

"What a delightful human. Yes, of course I'll let you go—as soon as you kill this man for me." Sigma pointed down to Zero.

I spasmed again, back arching as I instinctively tried to rise. Zero didn't deserve this. He had enough blood on his conscience, he didn't deserve to be put in this position, to be the one to choose—

A gunshot rang out over the hill.

0X0X0

I stood, the bullet wound in my leg still painful but healing. Maybe this body came with decent self-repair functions after all? For whatever nonsense other-universe reason, my twisted ankle had healed along with the injuries from those virus-carrying zombies, almost like infection with Wildfire had made me stronger. But that was just ridiculous.

Ridiculous. I was about to learn what that word meant. It means, "if you try to tell anyone about it, they will just laugh like you are crazy. You probably are crazy." That's what it means. I swear I've never, ever meant it as much as I was about to.

Shane dropped, clutching a bleeding hole in his chest. I watched him fall as if in slow motion, expecting to feel some kind of emotional response; after all, I had never knowingly shot to kill a human before this moment. I had heard of the shock, the sense of self-revulsion, the regret that humans felt after killing another of their kind. Instead I felt nothing but the urge to finish the job with another bullet.

I guess that wasn't too ridiculous considering what I thought of Shane. I'd seen the way he looked at Lori when Rick wasn't watching. Like a greasy kid eyeing a hooker on the street corner. Sick.

I ignored the urge to silence the idiot, and instead, turned and delivered the last round in my P-90 into Sigma's laughing mouth. As he staggered, I let go of the gun to pick up X's body and lobbed my grenade high in the air. It sailed upward in a beautiful arc destined to terminate on Sigma's face. I smirked as my feet carried X and I away. "Catch."

Before the explosive blew I dashed for my bedroll, which lay in sight of the cars. Shuffling and stomping in the background told me that the zombies had started moving again, which meant I needed to stop fooling around and move to the next part of the plan: the switches.

The dusty blanket I used as a bed flipped aside to reveal the detonation switches with their dangling wires; my thumb popped the plexiglass cap off of one and pressed a tiny red button, triggering an explosion directly down the hill from where the cars stood idle. Meatsacks flew everywhere. I saw Rick, one leg out of his station wagon as if to go after Shane, take one look at me and pull himself back into the drivers' seat. The engines of both cars revved and took off down the hill.

Zombies blocked their way in a screaming multitude. I popped the cap off the next switch and pressed it, and the next, and the next, clearing a pathway through the crowds of undead by explosive force. The vehicles bumped and thumped down a slope pockmarked with wide, shallow craters.

Still draped over my shoulder, X's birthday-suited body shuddered and twitched. With the survivors' path clear for the moment, I put the man down on the rumpled blanket and checked his vital signs. Pulse, racing out of control. Breathing shallow and rapid. Eyes dilated and twitching sightlessly back and forth. He groaned.

"Zee. Don'. You hav. Ill me. Kill me!"

"Fight it, X!" I shouted at him point-blank. "You can beat this, you're immune! Fight!"

I glanced in the direction of the survivors, who had almost made it to the burning forest; once they reached the treeline, they had to take care of themselves on their own. At least we had managed to light it up well enough to make Sigma move out his troops. I grabbed the last switch and popped off the cap.

"He won't survive." Sigma's grimy voice interjected.

My finger jammed down the button with extreme prejudice, blowing up the one last batch of meatsacks barring the survivors' escape route. Chunks of rotting flesh flew away from the detonation like shrapnel from a grim grenade, thunking into the vehicles as they escaped the reaching claws of the rotting legion. That done, I jumped to my feet and quickdrew the Z-Saber in a furious twirl; Sigma stepped casually out of range, chuckling evilly.

"You killed that human without even hesitating. I'm proud of you, Commander Zero. You've finally realized they're not worth protecting."

I replied through gritted teeth. "I shot him to save the others, Sigma, just the same as I'll cut you down to save them again."

The body-snatching villain tilted his corpse's head at an awkward angle. "You thought you saved them? How amusing. This world is mine now, Hunters. Every human in it will die."

At this point I noticed that, despite the occasional pause, the lead enemy units had reached the edge of camp. Zombies closed in from every direction in an unholy swarm. At my feet, X choked on his own bile. He wasn't long for this world and I had a job to do.

"No." I reached behind my back for one last surprise: a brick of C-4, complete with a timed detonator, held in reserve just for this precious moment. Sigma's eyes settled on it and widened in recognition as I spoke. "I don't think so, baldy. Because here, in this universe, I get the feeling even regeneration tech won't save you from a mouthful of high explosives."

I charged forward as the monster backpedaled, waving his arms defensively as I brought back the Z-Saber for a killing slash. Sigma staggered away too slowly to escape. My sword sliced through the air towards his neck like a guillotine to the execution.

Only to clang off another sword.

Instinct took over before I knew what had happened. I pivoted right and kicked the defending swordsman in the chest in exchange for letting his counterattack slice into my body armor at the shoulder. A woman's voice spoke calmly over the din.

"I'm sorry, beloved, but I can't let you throw your life away here. Although perhaps you would have slid away before the explosion regardless; your friend has gone already."

In the time it took her to say that, I came within a stroke of finishing the fighter who had blocked my path to Sigma. Light blue plate covered his shoulders and upper chest while gauntlets guarded his arms from the elbow down, but nothing more than cloth covered the rest of him. His longsword flashed brightly against in the sun, the gems inset in its hilt sparkling perfectly in the day's yellow beams. A lightweight crown adorned the man's azure-haired head and a cape flowed elegantly from his shoulders. His smooth, androgenous face bore a look of steely focus and only the mildest scars of battle.

All in all, the armor and cape made me think "warrior princeling," but the hair and the crown just screamed "warrior princess." I wanted to call him out as a girly-man on the spot.

[X's dying note: It's no good trying to call Zero out for fashion hypocrisy here. He thinks his ponytail is manly. In fact, I have yet to see anyone convince him otherwise. Good luck trying. *Cough, cough, die.*]

Regardless of how he dressed, the princeling moved like a dancer who graduated from the fight school of hard knocks. A swordsman like him could normally have given me a real run for my money. But me? I felt more alive then than any time in the past week of fighting, and ready to let some blood flow to finish this off. I pushed in and sacrificed another slash against my body armor in exchange for a cut that sundered my opponent's shoulder plate and left a diagonal gash across his belly. His knees buckled at the sudden trauma.

The woman spoke again on the heels of her earlier statement. "Marth, return!"

A flash of red momentarily engulfed the warrior before he disappeared into a fist-sized black-and-purple ball. I looked around and witnessed a parade of freakishly proportioned monstrosities fighting off the zombie hordes, bashing, burning, thundering, slicing, freezing, shooting beams and blasts of brilliant energy into the fray. The Blue Bomber and Sigma had both vanished. It felt like the rotten-meat world I knew had backed off in the face of a brute force invasion of monsters and magic. And at the center of it all, like the eye of the hurricane, the mêlée provided a small spot of calm centered on a girl with perfect waist-length blue hair.

The wind from a nearby explosion ruffled my beard as she spoke. The entire scene struck me as nothing other than dreamlike, right down to the familiarity of the girl's sweet soprano voice.

"Zero. I know we didn't part on the best of terms, but I've been reconsidering my thoughts about our marriage. I want you to know that I think we can make this work.

"Of course, you'll lose all your memories of this before you marry me, won't you?" She tilted her head and smiled sadly, stepping forwards. Her perfect hair and pristine sailor skirt uniform ruffled in a sudden chill breeze, and as the smell of ozone drifted through the air, I found my tongue immobile and my feet rooted to the spot. She moved in on me like a siren on a hapless sailor. "Goodbye, my love."

Her lips approached mine. For all that I found myself unable to move away, I didn't miss the subtle glint of madness in the teenager's eye.

Our lips touched an instant after the universe disappeared. After another instant of void, I found myself in a new universe, another world.

Thank friggin' goodness.

* * *

_And that's it. _

_I'm sorry I have to quit this story. I really wanted to finish; the meaning of Asakura Ryoko's appearance here, the events preceding "The Melancholy of Megaman Zero," the true origin of Astro Boy, the final destinies of GLaDOS, Tsukishima, Chii of Tsubasa Chronicle, and Neraku of Inuyasha...it would have been a crossover grander than Super Smash Brothers itself, a complete with space-time/cross-universal travel and enriched by the whole gamut of human experience. And it would have been not just a crossover of others' works. One out of every three or four universes X and Zero visited was to be a setting of my own design. I meant for our heroes to grow in ways they never thought possible and one day return home as heroes of multiversal power and fame. Assuming they survived._

_Now X is dead, Zero is shaken to the core, and Sigma is still on the loose, spreading devastation and genocide to worlds unbounded. To top it all off, Alia doesn't know yet that she's pregnant. Great, huh? And I have to leave you here for the simple reason that I'm going to grad school and PhD students don't have much time to fool around. On top of that, I have a family to take care of. _

_Perhaps, just perhaps, I'll post a synopsis or something silly like that and leave others free to imagine the details. That would really be the last nail in the coffin. If I do that then I'll put it on the original SE rather than SE: Darker Worlds._

_Thank you for your reviews and please have fun. I'm leaving fanfiction dot net but it's still a great site with plenty of entertaining material. Keep writing and reading and work hard at what you do._

_Thanks,_

_Kaelen Mitharos_

_Amateur Author Extraordinaire_

_;)_


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